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IRISH IMPRESSIONS 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



HERETICS 

ORTHODOXY 

THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND 

A SHORT HISTORY OF 

ENGLAND 

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED 

THE BALL AND THE CROSS 

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 

MANALIVE 

THE FLYING INN 

THE INNOCENCE OF 

FATHER BROWN 

THE WISDOM OF FATHER 

BROWN 

THE NAPOLEON OF 

NOTTING HILL 

POEMS 

THE BALLAD OF THE 

WHITE HORSE 



IRISH 
IMPRESSIONS 



BY 

G. K. CHESTERTON 

author of 
"heretics," "orthodoxy,** 

"a short history of ENGLAND," 
ETC 



NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMXX 






Copyright, 1919, 
By John Lane Company 



i«;-i !9 1920 



8)C!,A559441 



CONTENTS 



y 



CHAPTER PAGB 

I. Two Stones in a Square , . , . 9 

11. The Root of Reality ..... 22 

III. The Family and the Feud • , . 47 

lY. The Paradox of Labour . t . % 66 

V. The Englishman in Ireland * < , 89 

VI. The Mistake of England . . . .108 

VII. The Mistake of Ireland . . . .131 

VIII. An Example and a Question . . .159 

IX Belfast and the Religious Problem . 190 



IRISH IMPRESSIONS 



I — Two Stones in a Square 



WHEN I had for the first time 
crossed St. George's Channel, and 
for the first time stepped out of a 
Dublin hotel on to St. Stephen's 
Green, the first of all my impressions was that 
of a particular statue, or rather portion of a 
statue. I left many traditional mysteries al- 
ready in my track, but they did not trouble me 
as did this random glimpse or vision. I have 
never understood why the Channel is called 
St. George's Channel ; it would seem more nat- 
ural to call it St. Patrick's Channel since the 
great missionary did almost certainly cross 
that unquiet sea and look up at those myste- 
rious mountains. And though I should be 
enchanted, in an abstract artistic sense, to 
imagine St. George sailing towards the sun- 
set, flying the silver and scarlet colours of his 
cross, I cannot in fact regard that journey as 



10 Irish Impressions 

the most fortunate of the adventures of that 
flag. Nor, for that matter, do I know why 
the Green should be called St. Stephen's 
Green, nor why the parliamentary enclosure 
at Westminster is also connected with the first 
of the martyrs; unless it be because St. Ste- 
phen was killed with stones. The stones piled 
together to make modern political buildings, 
might perhaps be regarded as a cairn, or heap 
of missiles, marking the place of the murder 
of a witness to the truth. And while it seems 
unlikely that St. Stephen was pelted with 
statues as well as stones, there are undoubt- 
edly statues that might well kill a Christian 
at sight. Among these graven stones, from 
which the saints suffer, I should certainly in- 
clude some of those figures in frock coats 
standing opposite St. Stephen's, Westminster. 
There are many such statues in Dublin also; 
but the one with which I am concerned was 
at first partially veiled from me. And the 
veil was at least as symbolic as the vision. 

I saw what seemed the crooked hind legs 
of a horse on a pedestal and deduced an eques- 
trian statue, in the somewhat bloated fashion 



Two Stones in a Square 11 

of the early eighteenth century equestrian 
statues. But the figure, from where I stood, 
was wholly hidden in the tops of trees grow- 
ing round it in a ring; masking it with leafy 
curtains or draping it with leafy banners. 
But they were green banners, that waved and 
glittered all about it in the sunlight; and the 
face they hid was the face of an English king. 
Or rather, to speak more correctly, a German 
king. 

When laws can stay ... it was impossible 
that an old rhyme should not run in my head, 
and words that appealed to the everlasting 
revolt of the green things of the earth. . . . 
"And when the leaves in summer time their 
colour dare not show." The rhyme seemed 
to reach me out of remote times and find ar- 
resting fulfilment, like a prophecy; it was im- 
possible not to feel that I had seen an omen. 
I was conscious vaguely of a vision of green 
garlands hung on gray stone; and the wreaths 
were living and growing, and the stone was 
dead. Something in the simple substances 
and elemental colours, in the white sunlight, 
and the sombre and even secret image, held 



12 Irish Impressions 

the mind for a moment in the midst of all 
the moving city, like a sign given in a dream. 
I w^as told that the figure was that of one of 
the first Georges; but indeed I seemed to 
know already that it was the White Horse of 
Hanover that had thus grown gray with Irish 
weather or green with Irish foliage. I knew 
only too well, already, that the George who 
had really crossed the Channel was not the 
saint. This was one of those German princes 
whom the English aristocracy used when it 
made the English domestic polity aristocratic 
and the English foreign policy German. 
Those Englishmen who think the Irish are 
pro-German, or those Irishmen who think the 
Irish ought to be pro-German, would pre- 
sumably expect the Dublin populace to have 
hung the statue of this German deliverer with 
national flowers and nationalist flags. For 
some reason, however, I found no traces of 
Irish tributes round the pedestal of the Teu- 
tonic horseman. I wondered how many peo- 
ple in the last fifty years have ever cared 
about it, or even been conscious of their own 
carelessness. I wonder how many have ever 



Two Stones in a Square 13 

troubled to look at it, or even troubled not to 
look at it. If it fell down, I wonder whether 
anybody would put it up again. I do not 
know; I only know that Irish gardeners, or 
some such Irish humorists, had planted trees 
in a ring round that prancing equestrian fig- 
ure; trees that had, so to speak, sprung up 
and choked him, making him more unrecog- 
nisable than a Jack-in-the-Green. Jack or 
George had vanished; but the Green re- 
mained. 

About a stone's-throw from this calamity 
in stone there stood, at the corner of a gor- 
geously coloured flower-walk, a bust evidently 
by a modern sculptor with modern symbolic 
ornament surmounted by the fine falcon face 
of the poet Mangan; who dreamed and drank 
and died, a thoughtless and thriftless outcast, 
in the darkest of the Dublin streets around 
that place. This individual Irishman really 
was what we v^ere told that all Irishmen were, 
hopeless, heedless, irresponsible, impossible, a 
tragedy of failure. And yet it seemed to be 
his head that was lifted and not hidden; the 
gay flowers only showed up this graven im- 



14 Irish Impressions 

age as the green leaves shut out the other; 
everything around him seemed bright and 
busy, and told rather of a new time. It was 
clear that modern men did stop to look at 
him; indeed modern men had stayed there 
long enough to make him a monument. It 
was almost certain that if his monument fell 
down, it really would be put up again. I 
think it very likely there would be competi- 
tion among advanced modern artistic schools 
of admitted crankiness and unimpeachable 
lunacy; that somebody would want to cut out 
a Cubist Mangan in a style less of stone than 
of bricks; or to set up a Vorticist Mangan, 
like a frozen whirlpool, to terrify the chil- 
dren playing in that flowery lane. For when 
I afterwards went into the Dublin Art Club, 
or mixed generally in the stimulating society 
of the intellectuals of the Irish capital, I 
found a multitude of things which moved 
both my admiration and amusement. Per- 
haps the best thing of all was that it was the 
one society that I have seen where the in- 
tellectuals were intellectual. But nothing 
pleased me more than the fact that even Irish 



Two Stones in a Square 15 

art was taken with a certain Irish pugnacity; 
as if there could be street fights about aesthetics 
as there once were about theology. I could 
almost imagine an appeal for pikes to settle 
a point about art needlework, or a sugges- 
tion of dying on the barricades for a differ- 
ence about bookbinding. And I could still 
more easily imagine a sort of ultra-civilised 
civil war round the half-restored bust of poor 
Mangan. But it was in a yet plainer and 
more popular sense that I felt that bust to be 
the sign of a new world, where the statue of 
Royal George was only the ruin of an old one. 
And though I have since seen many much 
more complex, and many decidedly contradic- 
tory things in Ireland, the allegory of those 
two stone images in that public garden has 
remained in my memory, and has not been 
reversed. The Glorious Revolution, the great 
Protestant Deliverer, the Hanoverian Succes- 
sion, these things were the very pageant and 
apotheosis of success. The Whig aristocrat 
was not merely victorious; it was as a victor 
that he asked for victory. The thing was 
fully expressed in all the florid and insolent 



16 Irish Impressions 

statuary of the period, in all those tumid 
horsemen in Roman uniform and Rococo per- 
iwigs shown as prancing in perpetual motion 
down shouting streets to their triumphs ; only 
to-day the streets are empty and silent, and 
the horse stands still. Of such a kind was 
the imperial figure round which the ring of 
trees had risen, like great green fans to soothe 
a sultan, or great green curtains to guard him. 
But it was in a sort of mockery that his pa- 
vilion was thus painted w^ith the colour of his 
conquered enemies. For the king was dead 
behind his curtains, his voice will be heard 
no more, and no man will even wish to hear 
it, while the world endures. The dynastic 
eighteenth century is dead if anything is dead ; 
and these idols at least are only stones. But 
only a few yards away, the stone that the 
builders rejected is really the head of a cor- 
ner, standing at the corner of a new pathway, 
coloured and crowded with children and with 
flowers. 

That, I suspect, is the paradox of Ireland 
in the modern world. Everything that was 
thought progressive, as a prancing horse, has 



Two Stones in a Square 17 

come to a standstill. Everything that was 
thought decadent, as a dying drunkard, has 
risen from the dead. All that seemed to have 
reached a cul de sac has turned the corner, 
and stands at the opening of a new road. All 
that thought itself on a pedestal has found 
itself up a tree. And that is why those two 
chance stones seem to me to stand like graven 
images on either side of the gateway by which 
a man enters Ireland. And yet I had not left 
the same small enclosure till I had seen one 
other sight which was even more symbolic 
than the flowers near the foot of the poet's 
pedestal. A few yards beyond the Mangan 
bust was a model plot of vegetables, like a 
kitchen garden with no kitchen or house at- 
tached to it, planted out in a patchwork of 
potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, to prove how 
much could be done with an acre. And I 
realised as in a vision that all over the new 
Ireland that patch is repeated like a pattern; 
and where there is a real kitchen garden there 
is also a real kitchen; and it is not a com- 
munal kitchen. It is more typical even than 
the poet and the flowers ; for these flowers are 



18 Irish Impressions 

also food, and this poetry is also property; 
property which, when properly distributed, is 
the poetry of the average man. It was only 
afterwards that I could realise all the reali- 
ties to which this accident corresponded; but 
even this little public experiment, at the first 
glance, had something of the meaning of a 
public monument. It was this which the 
earth itself had reared against the monstrous 
image of the German monarch; and I might 
have called this chapter Cabbages and Kings. 
My life is passed in making bad jokes and 
seeing them turn into true prophecies. In 
the little town in South Bucks, where I live, 
I remember some talk of appropriate cere- 
monies in connection with the work of send- 
ing vegetables to the Fleet. There was a sug- 
gestion that these proceedings should end with 
" God Save the King," an amendment by 
some one (of a more naval turn of mind) to 
substitute " Rule Britannia;" and the opposi- 
tion of one individual, claiming to be of Irish 
extraction, who loudly refused to lend a voice 
to either. Whatever I retain, in such rural 
scenes, of the frivolity of Fleet Street led me 



Two Stones in a Square 19 

to suggest that we could all join in singing 
" The Wearing of the Greens.'' But I have 
since discovered that this remark, like other 
typical utterances of the village idiot, was in 
truth inspired; and was a revelation and a 
vision from across the sea, a vision of what 
was really being done, not by the village idiots 
but by the village wise men. For the whole 
miracle of modern Ireland might well be 
summed up in the simple change from the 
word " green " to the word " greens." Nor 
would it be true to say that the first is poet- 
ical and the second practical. For a green 
tree is quite as poetical as a green flag; and 
no one in touch with history doubts that the 
waving of the green flag has been very useful 
to the growing of the green tree. But I shall 
have to touch upon all such controversial top- 
ics later, for those to whom such statements 
are still controversial. Here I would only 
begin by recording a first impression as viv- 
idly coloured and patchy as a modernist pic- 
ture ; a square of green things growing where 
they are least expected; the new vision of Ire- 
land. The discovery, for most Englishmen, 



20 Irish Impressions 

will be like touching the trees of a faded tap- 
estry, and finding the forest alive and full of 
birds. It will be as if, on some dry urn or 
dreary column, figures which had already be- 
gun to crumble magically began to move and 
dance. For culture as well as mere caddish- 
ness assumed the decay of these Celtic or 
Catholic things; there were artists sketching 
the ruins as well as trippers picnicking in 
them; and it was not only evidence that a 
final silence had fallen on the harp of Tara, 
that it did not play " Tararaboomdeay." 
Englishmen believed in Irish decay even 
when they were large-minded enough to la- 
ment it. It might be said that even those 
who were penitent because the thing was 
murdered, were quite convinced that it was 
killed. The meaning of these green and 
solid things before me is that it is not a ghost 
that has risen from the grave. A flower, like 
a flag, might be little more than a ghost; but 
a fruit has that sacramental solidity which in 
all mythologies belongs not to a ghost but to 
a god. This sight of things sustaining, and 



Two Stones in a Square 21 

a beauty that nourishes and does not merely 
charm, is the premonition of practicality in 
the miracle of modern Ireland. It is a mir- 
acle more marvellous than the resurrection of 
the dead. It is the resurrection of the body. 



II — The Root of Reality 



THE only excuse of literature is to make 
things new; and the chief misfortune 
of journalism is that it has to make 
them old. What is hurried has to be 
hackneyed. Suppose a man has to write on 
a particular subject, let us say America; if 
he has a day to do it in, it is possible that, 
in the last afterglow of sunset, he may have 
discovered at least one thing which he him- 
self really thinks about America. It is con- 
ceivable that somewhere under the evening 
star he may have a new idea, even about the 
new world. If he has only half an hour in 
which to write, he will just have time to con- 
sult an encyclopaedia and vaguely remember 
the latest leading articles. The encyclopaedia 
will be only about a decade out of date; the 
leading articles will be aeons out of date — 
having been written under similar conditions 

22 



I 



The Root of Reality 23 

of modern rush. If he has only a quarter of 
an hour in which to write about America, he 
may be driven in mere delirium and madness 
to call her his Gigantic Daughter in the west, 
to talk of the feasibility of Hands Across the 
Sea, or even to call himself an Anglo-Saxon, 
when he might as well call himself a Jute. 
But whatever debasing banality be the effect 
of business scurry in criticism, it is but one 
example of a truth that can be tested in twenty 
fields of experience. If a man must get to 
Brighton as quickly as possible, he can get 
there quickest by travelling on rigid rails on 
a recognised route. If he has time and 
money for motoring, he will still use public 
roads; but he will be surprised to find how 
many public roads look as new and quiet as 
private roads. If he has time enough to walk, 
he may find for himself a string of fresh foot- 
paths, each one a fairy-tale. This law of the 
leisure needed for the awakening of wonder 
applies, indeed, to things superficially famil- 
iar as well as to things superficially fresh. 
The chief case for old enclosures and bound- 
aries is that they enclose a space in which new 



24 Irish Impressions 

things can always be found later, like live 
fish within the four corners of a net. The 
chief charm of having a home that is secure 
is having leisure to feel it as strange. 

I have often done the little I could to 
correct the stale trick of taking things for 
granted: all the more because it is not even 
taking them for granted. It is taking them 
without gratitude; that is, emphatically as not 
granted. Even one's own front door, released 
by one's own latchkey, should not only open 
inward on things familiar, but outward on 
things unknown. Even one's own domestic 
fireside should be wild as well as domesti- 
cated ; for nothing could be wilder than fire. 
But if this light of the higher ignorance 
should shine even on familiar places, it should 
naturally shine most clearly on the roads of 
a strange land. It would be well if a man 
could enter Ireland really knowing that he 
knows nothing about Ireland; if possible, not 
even the name of Ireland. The misfortune 
is that most men know the name too well, 
and the thing too little. This book would 
probably be a better book^ as well as a bet- 



The Root of Reality 25 

ter joke, if I were to call the island through- 
out by some name like Atlantis, and only re- 
veal on the last page that I was referring to 
Ireland. Englishmen would see a situation 
of great interest, objects with which they 
could feel considerable sympathy, and oppor- 
tunities of which they might take consider- 
able advantage, if only they would really look 
at the place plain and straight, as they would 
at some entirely new island, with an entirely 
new name, discovered by that seafaring ad- 
venture which is the real romance of Eng- 
land. In short, he might do something with 
it, if he would only treat it as an object in 
front of him, and not as a subject or story left 
behind him. There will be occasion later to 
say all that should be said of the need of 
studying the Irish story. But the Irish story 
is one thing, and what is called the Irish 
Question quite another; and in a purely prac- 
tical sense the best thing the stranger can do 
is to forget the Irish Question and look at 
the Irish. If he looked at them simply and 
steadily, as he would look at the natives of 
an entirely new nation with a new name, he 



26 Irish Impressions 

would become conscious of a very strange but 
entirely solid fact. He would become con- 
scious of it, as a man in a fairy tale might be- 
come conscious that he had crossed the bor- 
der of fairyland, by such a trifle as a talking 
cow or a haystack walking about on legs. 

For the Irish Question has never been 
discussed in England. Men have discussed 
Home Rule ; but those who advocated it most 
warmly, and as I think wisely, did not even 
know what the Irish meant by Home. Men 
have talked about Unionism; but they have 
never even dared to propose Union. A Un- 
ionist ought to mean a man who is not even 
conscious of the boundary of the two coun- 
tries; who can walk across the frontier of 
fairyland, and not even notice the walking 
haystack. As a fact, the Unionist always 
shoots at the haystack; though he never hits 
it. But the limitation is not limited to Un- 
ionists; as I have already said, the English 
Radicals have been quite as incapable of go- 
ing to the root of the matter. Half the case 
for Home Rule was that Ireland could not 
be trusted to the English Home Rulers. They 



The Root of Reality 27 

also, to recur to the parable, have been un- 
able to take the talking cow by the horns; 
for I need hardly say that the talking cow 
is an Irish bull. What has been the matter 
with their Irish politics was simply that they 
were English politics. They discussed the 
Irish Question; but they never seriously con- 
templated the Irish Answer. That is, the 
Liberal was content with the negative truth, 
that the Irish should not be prevented from 
having the sort of law they liked. But the 
Liberal seldom faced the positive truth, about 
what sort of law they would like. He in- 
stinctively avoided the very imagination of 
this; for the simple reason that the law the 
Irish would like is as remote from what is 
called Liberal as from what is called Union- 
ist. Nor has the Liberal ever embraced it 
in his broadest liberality, nor the Unionist 
ever absorbed it into his most complete uni- 
fication. It remains outside us altogether, a 
thing to be stared at like a fairy cow; and by 
far the wisest English visitor is he who will 
simply stare at it. Sooner or later he will 
see what it means ; which is simply this : that 



28 Irish Impressions 

whether it be a case for coercion or emanci- 
pation (and it might be used either way) the 
fact is that a free Ireland would not only not 
be what we call lawless, but might not even 
be what we call free. So far from being an 
anarchy, it would be an orderly and even con- 
servative civilisation — like the Chinese. But 
it would be a civilisation so fundamentally 
different from our own, that our own liberals 
would differ from it as much as our own con- 
servatives. The fair question for an English- 
man is whether that fundamental difference 
would make division dangerous; it has al- 
ready made union impossible. Now in turn- 
ing over these notes of so brief a visit, suf- 
fering from all the stale scurry of my jour- 
nalistic trade, I have been in doubt between 
a chronological and a logical order of events. 
But I have decided in favour of logic, of the 
high light that really revealed the picture, 
and by which I firmly believe that everything 
else should be seen. And if any one were to 
ask me what was the sight that struck me most 
in Ireland, both as strange and as significant, 
I should know what to reply. I saw it long 



The Boot of Reality 29 

after I had seen the Irish cities, had felt some- 
thing of the brilliant bitterness of Dublin and 
the stagnant optimism of Belfast; but I put 
it first here because I am certain that with- 
out it all the rest is meaningless; that it lies 
behind all politics, enormous and silent, as 
the great hills lie beyond Dublin. 

I was moving in a hired motor down a 
road in the North-West, towards the middle 
of that rainy autumn. I was not moving very 
fast; because the progress was slowed down 
to a solemn procession by crowds of families 
with their cattle and live stock going to the 
market beyond ; which things also are an alle- 
gory. But what struck my mind and stuck 
in it was this : that all down one side of the 
road, as far as we went, the harvest was gath- 
ered in neatly and safely; and all down the 
other side of the road it was rotting in the 
rain. Now the side where it was safe was 
a string of small plots worked by peasant pro- 
prietors, as petty by our standards as a row 
of the cheapest villas. The land on which all 
the harvest was wasted was the land of a large 
modern estate. I asked why the landlord 



30 Irish Impressions 

was later with his harvesting than the peas- 
ants; and I was told rather vaguely that there 
had been strikes and similar labour troubles. 
I did not go into the rights of the matter; 
but the point here is that, whatever they were, 
the moral is the same. You may curse the 
cruel Capitalist landlord or you may rave at 
the ruffianly Bolshevist strikers ; but you must 
admit that between them they had produced 
a stoppage, which the peasant proprietorship 
a few yards off did not produce. You might 
support either where they conflicted, but you 
could not deny the sense in which they had 
combined, and combined to prevent what a 
few rustics across the road could combine to 
produce. For all that we in England agree 
about and disagree about, all for which we 
fight and all from which we differ, our dark- 
ness and our light, our heaven and hell, were 
there on the left side of the road. On the 
right side of the road lay something so differ- 
ent that we do not even differ from it. It 
may be that Trusts are rising like towers of 
gold and iron, overshadowing the earth and | 
shutting out the sun ; but they are only rising 



The Root of Reality 31 

on the left side of the road. It may be that 
Trades Unions are laying labyrinths of inter- 
national insurrection, cellars stored with the 
dynamite of a merely destructive democracy; 
but all that international maze lies to the left 
side of the road. Employment and unem- 
ployment are there; Marx and the Manches- 
ter School are there. The left side of the 
road may even go through amazing transfor- 
mations of its own ; its story may stride across 
abysses of anarchy; but it will never step 
across the road. The landlord's estate may 
become a sort of Morris Utopia, organised 
communally by Socialists, or more probably 
by Guild Socialists. It may (as I fear is 
much more likely) pass through the stage of 
an employer's model village to the condition 
of an old pagan slave-state. But the peasants 
across the road would not only refuse the 
Servile State, but would quite as resolutely 
refuse the Utopia. Europe may seem to be 
rent from end to end by the blast of a Bol- 
shevist trumpet, sundering the bourgeois from 
the proletarian; but the peasant across the 
road is neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian. 



32 Irish Impressions 

England may seem to be rent by an irrecon- 
cilable rivalry between Capital and Labour; 
but the peasant across the road is both a cap- 
italist and a labourer. He is several other 
curious things; including the man v^ho got his 
crops in first; who was literally first in the 
field. 

To an Englishman, especially a Londoner, 
this was like walking to the corner of a Lon- 
don street and finding the policeman in rags, 
with a patch on his trousers and a smudge 
on his face; but the crossing-sweeper wearing 
a single eyeglass and a suit fresh from a West 
End tailor. In fact, it was nearly as surpris- 
ing as a walking haystack or a talking cow. 
What was generally dingy, dilatory, and 
down-at-heels was here comparatively tidy 
and timely; what was orderly and organised 
was belated and broken down. For it must 
be sharply realised that the peasant proprie- 
tors succeeded here, not only because they 
were really proprietors, but because they were 
only peasants. It was because they were on 
a small scale that they were a great success. 
It was because they were too poor to have 



The Boot of Reality 33 

servants that they grew rich in spite of strik- 
ers. It was, so far as it went, the flattest pos- 
sible contradiction to all that is said in Eng- 
land, both by Collectivists and Capitalists, 
about the efliciency of the great organisation. 
For in so far as it had failed, it had actually 
failed, not only through being great, but 
through being organised. On the left side of 
the road the big machine had stopped work- 
ing, because it was a big machine. The small 
men were still working, because they were not 
machines. Such were the strange relations of 
the two things, that the stars in their courses 
fought against Capitalism; that the very 
clouds rolling over that rocky valley warred 
for its pigmies against its giants. The rain 
falls alike on the just and the unjust; yet here 
it had not fallen alike on the rich and poor. 
It had fallen to the destruction of the rich. 
Now I do, as a point of personal opinion, 
believe that the right side of the road was 
really the right side of the road. That is, I 
believe it represented the right side of the 
question; that these little pottering peasants 
had got hold of the true secret, which is 



34 Irish Impressions 

missed both by Capitalism and Collectivism. 
But I am not here urging my own preferences 
on my own countrymen; and I am not con- 
cerned primarily to point out that this is an 
argument against Capitalism and Collectiv- 
ism. What I do point out is that it is the 
fundamental argument against Unionism. 
Perhaps it is, on that ultimate level, the only 
argument against Unionism; which is prob- 
ably why it is never used against Unionists. 
I mean, of course, that it was never really 
used against English Unionists by English 
Home Rulers, in the recriminations of that 
Irish Question which was really an English 
Question. The essential demanded of that 
question was merely that it should be an open 
question; a thing rather like an open wound. 
Modern industrial society is fond of prob- 
lems, and therefore not at all fond of solu- 
tions. A consideration of those who really 
have understood this fundamental fact will be 
sufRcient to show how confusing and useless 
are the mere party labels in the matter. 
George Wyndham was a Unionist who was 
deposed because he was a Home Ruler. Sir 



The Root of Reality 35 

Horace Plunkett is a Unionist who is trusted 
because he is a Home Ruler. By far the most 
revolutionary piece of Nationalism that was 
ever really effected for Ireland was effected 
by Wyndham, who was an English Tory 
squire. And by far the most brutal and 
brainless piece of Unionism that was ever 
imposed on Ireland was imposed in the name 
of the Radical theory of Free Trade, when 
the Irish juries brought in verdicts of wilful 
murder against Lord John Russell. I say 
this to show that my sense of a reality is quite 
apart from the personal accident that I have 
myself always been a Radical in English pol- 
itics, as well as a Home Ruler in Irish pol- 
itics. But I say it even more in order to re- 
affirm that the English have first to forget all 
their old formulae and look at a new fact. 
It is not a new fact; but it is new to them. 

To realise it, we must not only go outside 
the British parties but outside the British 
Empire, outside the very universe of the or- 
dinary Briton. The real question can be eas- 
ily stated, for it is as simple as it is large. 
What is going to happen to the peasantries 



36 Irish Impressions 

of Europe, or for that matter of the whole 
world? It would be far better, as I have al- 
ready suggested, if we could consider it as a 
new case of some peasantry in Europe, or 
somewhere else in the world. It would be far 
better if we ceased to talk of Ireland and Scot- 
land, and began to talk of Ireland and Serbia. 
Let us, for the sake of our own mental com- 
posure, call this unfortunate people Slovenes. 
But let us realise that these remote Slovenes 
are, by the testimony of every truthful trav- 
eller, rooted in the habit of private property, 
and now ripening into a considerable private 
prosperity. It will often be necessary to re- 
member that the Slovenes are Roman Cath- 
olics; and that, with that impatient pugnacity 
which marks the Slovene temperament, they 
have often employed violence, but always for; 
the restoration of what they regarded as a 
reasonable system of private property. Now 
in a hundred determining districts, of which 
France is the most famous, this system has 
prospered. It has its own faults as well as 
its own merits; but it has prospered. What 
is going to happen to it? I will here confine 



The Root of Reality 37 

myself to saying with the most solid confi- 
dence what is not going to happen to it. It 
is not going to be really ruled by Socialists; 
and it is not going to be really ruled by mer- 
chant princes, like those who ruled Venice or 
like those who rule England. 

It is not so much that England ought not 
to rule Ireland as that England cannot. It 
is not so much that Englishmen cannot rule 
Irishmen, as that merchants cannot rule peas- 
ants. It is not so much merely that we have 
dealt benefits to England and blows to Ire- 
land. It is that our benefits for England 
would be blows to Ireland. And this we al- 
ready began to admit in practice, before we 
had even dimly begun to conceive it in the- 
ory. We do not merely admit it in special 
laws against Ireland like the Coercion Acts, 
or special laws in favour of Ireland like the 
Land Acts; it is admitted even more by spe- 
cially exempting Ireland than by specially 
studying Ireland. In other words, whatever 
else the Unionists want, they do not want to 
unite; they are not quite so mad as that. I 
cannot myself conceive any purpose in hav- 



38 Irish Impressions 

ing one parliament except to pass one law; 
and one law for England and Ireland is sim- 
ply something that becomes more insanely im- 
possible every day. If the two societies were 
stationary, they would be sufficiently separate ; 
but they are both moving rapidly in opposite 
directions. England may be moving towards 
a condition which some call Socialism, and I 
call Slavery; but whatever it is, Ireland is 
speeding farther and farther from it. What- 
ever it is, the men who manage it will no more 
be able to manage a European peasantry than 
the peasants in these mud cabins could 
manage the Stock Exchange. All attempts, 
whether imperial or international, to lump 
these peasants along with some large and 
shapeless thing called Labour, are part of a 
cosmopolitan illusion which sees mankind as 
a map. The world of the International is a 
pill, as round and as small. It is true that 
all men want health; but it is certainly not 
true that all men want the same medicine. 
Let us allow the cosmopolitan to survey the 
world from China to Peru ; but do not let us 



The Boot of Reality 39 

allow the chemist to identify Chinese opium 
and Peruvian bark. 

My parallel about the Slovenes was only a 
fancy; yet I can give a real parallel from the 
Slavs which is a fact. It was a fact from my 
own experience in Ireland; and it exactly 
illustrates the real international sympathies of 
peasants. Their internationalism has nothing 
to do with the International. I had not been 
in Ireland many hours when several people 
mentioned to me with considerable excitement 
some news from the Continent. They were 
not, strange as it may seem, dancing with joy 
over the disaster of Caporetto, or glowing 
with admiration of the Crown Prince. Few 
really rejoiced in English defeats; and none 
really rejoiced in German victories. It was 
news about the Bolshevists ; but it was not the 
news of how nobly they had given votes to 
the Russian women, nor of how savagely they 
had fired bullets into the Russian princesses. 
It was the news of a check to the Bolshevists ; 
but it was not a glorification of Kerensky or 
Korniloff, or any of the newspaper heroes who 



40 Irish Impressions 

seem to have satisfied us all, so long as their 
names began with K and nobody knew any- 
thing about them. In short, it was nothing 
that could be found in all our myriad news- 
paper articles on the subject. I would give 
an educated Englishman a hundred guesses 
about what it was ; but even if he knew it, he 
would not know what it meant. 

It had appeared in the little paper about 
peasant produce so successfully conducted by 
Mr. George Russell, the celebrated " A. E.," 
and it was told me eagerly by the poet him- 
self, by a learned and brilliant Jesuit, and by 
several other people, as the great news from 
Europe. It was simply the news that the 
Jewish Socialists of the Bolshevist Govern- 
ment had been attempting to confiscate the 
peasants' savings in the co-operative banks; 
and had been forced to desist. And they 
spoke of it as of a great battle won on the 
Danube or the Rhine. That is what I mean 
when I say that these people are of a pattern 
and belong to a system which cuts across all 
our own political divisions. They felt them- 
selves fighting the Socialists as fiercely as any 



The Root of Reality 41 

Capitalist can feel it; but they not only knew 
what they were fighting against, but what they 
were fighting for; which is more than the 
Capitalist does. I do not know how far mod- 
ern Europe really shows a menace of Bol- 
shevism, or how far merely a panic of Capi- 
talism. But I know that if any honest re- 
sistance has to be offered to mere robbery, the 
resistance of Ireland will be the most honest, 
and probably the most important. It may be 
that international Israel will launch against 
us out of the East an insane simplification of 
the unity of Man, as Islam once launched out 
of the East an insane simplification of the 
unity of God. If it be so, it is where prop- 
erty is well distributed that it will be well 
defended. The post of honour will be with 
those who fight in very truth for their own 
land. If ever there came such a drive of wild 
dervishes against us, it would be the chariots 
and elephants of plutocracy that would roll 
in confusion and rout; and the squares of the 
peasant infantry would stand. 

Anyhow, the first fact to realise is that we 
are dealing with a European peasantry; and 



42 Irish Impressions 

it would be really better, as I say, to think of 
it first as a Continental peasantry. There are 
numberless important inferences from this 
fact; but there is one point, politically topical 
and urgent, on which I may well touch here. 
It wall be well to understand about this peas- 
antry something that we generally misunder- 
stand, even about a Continental peasantry. 
English tourists in France or Italy commonly 
make the mistake of supposing that the peo- 
ple cheat, because the people bargain, or at- 
tempt to bargain. When a peasant asks ten- 
pence for something that is worth fourpence, 
the tourist misunderstands the whole problem. 
He commonly solves it by calling the man a 
thief and paying the tenpence. There are ten 
thousand errors in this, beginning with the 
primary error of an oligarchy, of treating a 
man as a servant when he feels more like a 
small squire. The peasant does not choose to 
receive insults; but he never expected to re- 
ceive tenpence. A man who understood him 
would simply suggest twopence, in a calm and 
courteous manner; and the two would event- 
ually meet in the middle at a perfectly just 



The Root of Reality 43 

price. There would not be what we call a 
fixed price at the beginning, but there would 
be a very firmly fixed price at the end: that 
is, the bargain once made would be a sacredly 
sealed contract. The peasant, so far from 
cheating, has his own horror of cheating; and 
certainly his own fury at being cheated. Now 
in the political bargain with the English, the 
Irish simply think they have been cheated. 
They think Home Rule was stolen from them 
after the contract was sealed; and it will be 
hard for any one to contradict them. If ^^ le 
Rot le veuW is not a sacred seal on a con- 
tract, what is? The sentiment is stronger be- 
cause the contract was a compromise. Home 
Rule was the fourpence and not the tenpence; 
and, in perfect loyalty to the peasant's code 
of honour, they have now reverted to the ten- 
pence. The Irish have now returned in a 
reaction of anger to their most extreme de- 
mands; not because we denied what they de- 
manded, but because we denied what we ac- 
cepted. As I shall have occasion to note, there 
are other and wilder elements in the quarrel; 
but the first fact to remember is that the quar- 



44 Irish Impressions 

rel began with a bargain, that it will probably 
have to end with another bargain; and that 
it will be a bargain with peasants. On the 
whole, in spite of abominable blunders and 
bad faith, I think there is still a chance of 
bargaining, but we must see that there is no 
chance of cheating. We may haggle like 
peasants, and remember that their first offer 
is not necessarily their last. But we must be 
as honest as peasants; and that is very hard 
for politicians. The great Parnell, a squire 
who had many of the qualities of a peasant 
(qualities the English so wildly misunder- 
stood as to think them English, when they 
were really very Irish), converted his people 
from a Fenianism fiercer than Sinn Fein to a 
Home Rule more moderate than that which 
sane statesmanship could now offer to Ireland. 
But the peasants trusted Parnell, not because 
they thought he was asking for it, but because 
they thought he could get it. Whatever we 
decide to give to Ireland, we must give it; 
It is now worse than useless to promise it. 
I will say here, once and for all, the hardest 
thing that an Englishman has to say of his 



The Root of Reality 45 

impressions of another great European peo- 
ple: that over all those hills and valleys our 
word is wind, and our bond is waste paper. 
But, in any case, the peasantry remains : and 
the whole weight of the matter is that it will 
remain. It is much more certain to remain 
than any of the commercial or colonial sys- 
tems that will have to bargain with it. We 
may honestly think that the British Empire is 
both more liberal and more lasting than the 
Austrian Empire, or other large political 
combinations. But a combination like the 
Austrian Empire could go to pieces, and ten 
such combinations could go to pieces, before 
people like the Serbians ceased to desire to 
be peasants, and to demand to be free peas- 
ants. And the British combination, precisely 
because it is a combination and not a com- 
munity, is in its nature more lax and liable to 
real schism than this sort of community, 
which might almost be called a communion. 
Any attack on it is like an attempt to abolish 
grass; which is not only the symbol of it in 
the old national song, but it is a very true sym- 
bol of it in any new philosophic history; a 



46 Irish Impressions 

symbol of its equality, its ubiquity, its mul- 
tiplicity, and its mighty power to return. To 
fight against grass is to fight against God ; we 
can only so mismanage our own city and our 
own citizenship that the grass grows in our 
own streets. And even then it is our streets 
that will be dead ; and the grass will still be 
alive. 



Ill — The Family and the Feud 

THERE was an old joke of my child- 
hood, to the effect that men might be 
grouped together with reference to 
their Christian names. I have for- 
gotten the cases then under consideration ; but 
contemporary examples would be sufficiently 
suggestive to-day. A ceremonial brother- 
hood - in - arms between Father Bernard 
Vaughan and Mr. Bernard Shaw seems full 
of possibilities. I am faintly pleased with the 
fancy of Mr. Arnold Bennett endeavouring 
to extract the larger humanities of fiction 
from the political differences of Mr. Arnold 
White and Mr. Arnold Lupton. I should 
pass my own days in the exclusive society of 
Professor Gilbert Murray and Sir Gilbert 
Parker; whom I can conceive as differing on 
some points from each other, and on some 
points from me. Now there is one odd thing 

47 



48 Irish Impressions 

to notice about this old joke; that it might 
have been taken in a more serious spirit, 
though in a saner style, in a yet older period. 
This fantasy of the Victorian Age might eas- 
ily have been a fact of the Middle Ages. 
There would have been nothing abnormal in 
the moral atmosphere of mediaevalism in some 
feast or pageant celebrating the fellowship of 
men who had the same patron saint. It seems 
mad and meaningless now, because the mean- 
ing of Christian names has been lost. They 
have fallen into a kind of chaos and oblivion 
which is highly typical of our time. I mean 
that there are still fashions in them, but no 
longer reasons for them. For a fashion is a 
custom without a cause. A fashion is a cus- 
tom to which men cannot get accustomed; 
simply because it is without a cause. That is 
why our industrial societies, touching every 
topic from the cosmos to the coat-collars, are 
merely swept by a succession of modes which 
are merely moods. They are customs that 
fail to be customary. And so, amid all our 
fashions in Christian names, we have forgot- 
ten all that was meant by the custom of Chris- 



The Family and the Feud 



tian names. We have forgotten all the orig- 
inal facts about a Christian name; but, above 
all, the fact that it was Christian. 

Now if we note this process going on in the 
world of London or Liverpool, we shall see 
that it has already gone even farther and fared 
even worse. The surname also is losing its 
root and therefore its reason. The surname 
has become as solitary as a nickname. For it 
might be argued that the first name is meant 
to be an individual and even isolated thing; 
but the last name is certainly meant, by all 
logic and history, to link a man with his hu- 
man origins, habits, or habitation. Histori- 
cally, it was a word taken from the town he 
lived in or the trade guild to which he be- 
longed; legally it is still the word on which 
all questions of legitimacy, succession, and 
testamentary arrangements turn. It is meant 
to be the corporate name; in that sense it is 
meant to be the impersonal name, as the other 
is meant to be the personal name. Yet in the 
modern mode of industrialism, it is more and 
more taken in a manner at once lonely and 
light. Any corporate social system built upon 



50 Irish Impressions 

it would seem as much of a joke as the joke 
about Christian names with which I began. 
If it would seem odd to require a Thomas 
to make friends with any other Thomas, it 
would appear almost as perplexing to insist 
that any Thompson must love any other 
Thompson. It may be that Sir Edward 
Henry, late of the Police Force, does not wish 
to be confined to the society of Mr. Edward 
Clodd. But would Sir Edward Henry nec- 
essarily have sought the society of Mr. O. 
Henry, entertaining as that society would 
have been? Sir John Barker, founder of the 
great Kensington emporium, need not spe- 
cially seek out and embrace Mr. John Mase- 
field ; but need he, any more swiftly, precipi- 
tate himself into the arms of Mr. Granville 
Barker? This vista of varieties would lead 
us far; but it is enough to notice, non- 
sense apart, that the most ordinary Eng- 
lish surnames have become unique in their 
social significance; they stand for the man 
rather than the race or the origins. Even 
when they are most common they are 
not communal. What we call the family 



The Family and the Feud 51 

name is not now primarily the name of the 
family. The family itself, as a corporate 
conception, has already faded into the back- 
ground, and is in danger of fading from the 
background. In short, our Christian names 
are not the only Christian things that we may 
lose. 

Now the second solid fact which struck me 
in Ireland (after the success of small property 
and the failure of large organisation) was the 
fact that the family was in a flatly contrary 
position. All I have said above, in current 
language, about the whole trend of the mod- 
ern world, is directly opposite to the whole 
trend of the modern Irish world. Not only 
is the Christian name a Christian name; but 
(what seems still more paradoxical and even 
pantomimic) the family name is really a fam- 
ily name. Touching the first of the two, it 
would be easy to trace out some very interest- 
ing truths about it, if they did not divert us 
from the main truth of this chapter: the sec- 
ond great truth about Ireland. People con- 
trasting the " education " of the two countries, 
or seeking to extend to the one the thing which 



52 Irish Impressions 

is called education in the other, might indeed 
do worse than study the simple problem of 
the meaning of Christian names. It might 
dawn at last, even on educationists, that there 
is a value in the content as well as the extent 
of culture; or (in other words), that know- 
ing nine hundred words is not always more 
important than knowing what some of them 
mean. It is strictly and soberly true that any 
peasant, in a mud cabin in County Clare, 
when he names his child Michael, may really 
have a sense of the presence that smote down 
Satan, the arms and plumage of the paladin 
of Paradise. I doubt whether it is so over- 
whelmingly probable that any clerk in any 
villa on Clapham Common, when he names 
his son John, has a vision of the holy eagle 
of the Apocalypse, or even of the mystical cup 
of the disciple whom Jesus loved. In the 
face of that simple fact, I have no doubt about 
which is the more educated man; and even 
a knowledge of the Daily Mail does not re- 
dress the balance. It is often said, and pos- 
sibly truly, that the peasant named Michael 
cannot write his own name. But it is quite 



The Family and the Feud 53 

equally true that the clerk named John can- 
not read his own name. He cannot read it 
because it is in a foreign language, and he 
has never been made to realise what it stands 
for. He does not know that John means 
John, as the other man does know that 
Michael means Michael. In that rigidly 
realistic sense, the pupil of industrial intel- 
lectualism does not even know his own name. 
But this is a parenthesis; because the point 
here is that the man in the street (as distinct 
from the man in the field) has been separated 
not only from his private but from his more 
public description. He has not only forgot- 
ten his name, but forgotten his address. In 
my own view, he is like one of those unfor- 
tunate people who wake up with their minds 
a blank, and therefore cannot find their way 
home. But whether or no we take this view 
of the state of things in an industrial society 
like the English, we must realise firmly that 
a totally opposite state of things exists in an 
agricultural society like the Irish. We may 
put it, if we like, in the form of an unfamiliar 
and even unfriendly fancy. We may say that 



54 Irish Impressions 

the house is greater than the man; that the 
house is an amiable ogre that runs after and 
recaptures the man. But the fact is there, fa- 
miliar or unfamiliar, friendly or unfriendly; 
and the fact is the family. The family pride 
is prodigious ; though it generally goes along 
with glowing masses of individual humility. 
And this family sentiment does attach itself 
to the family name; so that the very lan- 
guage in which men think is made up of fam- 
ily names. In this the atmosphere is singu- 
larly unlike that of England though much 
more like that of Scotland. Indeed, it will 
illustrate the impartial recognition of this, 
apart from any partisan deductions, that it is 
equally apparent in the place where Ireland 
and Scotland are supposed to meet. It is 
equally apparent in Ulster, and even in the 
Protestant corner of Ulster. 

In all the Ulster propaganda I came across, 
I think the thing that struck me most sharply 
was one phrase in one Unionist leading arti- 
cle. It was something that might fairly be 
called Scottish; something which was really 
even more Irish; but something which could 



The Family and the Feud 55 

not in the wildest mood be called English, 
and therefore could not with any rational 
meaning be called Unionist. Yet it was part 
of a passionately sincere, and indeed truly 
human and historic outburst of the politics of 
the northeast corner, against the politics of the 
rest of Ireland. Most of us remember that 
Sir Edward Carson put into the Government 
a legal friend of his named Campbell; it was 
at the beginning of the war, and few of us 
thought anything of the matter except that it 
was stupid to give posts to Carsonites at the 
most delicate crisis of the cause in Ireland. 
Since then, as we also know, the same Camp- 
bell has shown himself a sensible man, which 
I should translate as a practical Home Ruler; 
but which is anyhow something more than 
what is generally meant by a Carsonite. I 
entertain, myself, a profound suspicion that 
Carson also would very much like to be some- 
thing more than a Carsonite. But however 
this may be, his legal friend of whom I speak 
made an excellent speech, containing some 
concession to Irish popular sentiment. As 
might have been expected, there were furious 



56 Irish Impressions 

denunciations of him in the press of the 
Orange party; but not more furious than 
might have been found in the Morning Post 
or the Saturday Review, Nevertheless, there 
was one phrase that I certainly never saw in 
the Morning Post or the Saturday Review; 
one phrase I should never expect to see in any 
English paper, though I might very probably 
see it in a Scotch paper. It was this sentence, 
that was read to me from the leading article 
of a paper in Belfast: '^ There never was trea- 
son yet but a Campbell was at the bottom 
of it.'^ 

Let anybody imagine an Englishman say- 
ing, about some business quarrel, ^^ How like 
an Atkins!" or "What could you expect of 
a Wilkinson?" A moment's reflection will 
show that it would be even more impossible 
touching public men in public quarrels. No 
English Liberal ever connected the earlier ex- 
ploits of the present Lord Birkenhead with 
atavistic influences, or the totem of the wide 
and wandering tribe of Smith. No English 
patriot traced back the family tree of any 
English pacifist; or said there was never trea- 



The Family and the Feud 57 

son yet but a Pringle was at the bottom of it. 
It is the indefinite article that is here the def- 
inite distinction. It is the expression " a 
Campbell " which suddenly transforms the 
scene, and covers the robes of one lawyer with 
the ten thousand tartans of a whole clan. 
Now that phrase is the phrase that meets the 
traveller everywhere in Ireland. Perhaps the 
next most arresting thing I remember, after 
the agrarian revolution, was the way in which 
one poor Irishman happened to speak to me 
about Sir Roger Casement. He did not 
praise him as a deliverer of Ireland; he did 
not abuse him as a disgrace to Ireland; he 
did not say anything of the twenty things one 
might expect him to say. He merely referred 
to the rumour that Casement meant to become 
a Catholic just before his execution, and ex- 
pressed a sort of distant interest in it. He 
added : ^^ He's always been a Black Protes- 
tant. All the Casements are Black Protes- 
tants." I confess that, at the moment of that 
morbid story, there seemed to me to be some- 
thing unearthly about the very idea of there 
being other Casements. If ever a man seemed 



58 Irish Impressions 

solitary, if ever a man seemed unique to the 
point of being unnatural, it was that man on 
the two or three occasions when I have seen 
his sombre handsome face and his wild eyes; 
a tall, dark figure walking already in the 
shadow of a dreadful doom. I do not know 
if he was a Black Protestant; but he was a 
black something; in the sad if not the bad 
sense of the symbol. I fancy, in truth, he 
stood rather for the third of Browning's fa- 
mous triad of rhyming monosyllables. A dis- 
tinguished Nationalist Member, who hap- 
pened to have had a medical training, said 
to me, " I was quite certain when I first 
clapped eyes on him; the man was mad." 
Anyhow the man was so unusual, that it would 
never have occurred to me or any of my coun- 
trymen to talk as if there were a class or clan 
of such men. I could almost have imagined 
he had been born without father or mother. 
But for the Irish, his father and mother were 
really more important than he was. There 
is said to be a historical mystery about 
whether Parnell made a pun, when he said 
that the name of Kettle was a household word 



The Family and the Feud 59 

in Ireland. Few symbols could now be more 
contrary than the name of Kettle and the 
name of Casement (save for the courage they 
had in common) ; for the younger Kettle, who 
died so gloriously in France, was a National- 
ist as broad as the other was cramped, and as 
sane as the other was crazy. But if the fancy 
of a punster, following his own delightful 
vein of nonsense, should see something quaint 
in the image of a hundred such Kettles sing- 
ing as he sang by a hundred hearths, a more 
bitter jester, reading that black and obscure 
story of the capture on the coast, might utter 
a similar flippancy about other Casements, 
opening on the foam of such very perilous 
seas, in a land so truly forlorn. But even if 
we were not annoyed at the pun, we should 
be surprised at the plural. And our surprise 
would be the measure of the deepest differ- 
ence between England and Ireland. To ex- 
press it in the same idle imagery it would be 
the fact that even a casement is a part of a 
house, as a kettle is a part of a household. 
Every word in Irish is a household word. 
The English would no more have thought 



60 Irish Impressions 

of a plural for the word Gladstone than for 
the word God. They would never have im- 
agined Disraeli compassed about with a great 
cloud of Disraelis; it would have seemed to 
them altogether too Apocalyptic, and exag- 
geration of being on the side of the angels. 
To this day in England, as I have reason to 
know, it is regarded as a rabid and insane 
form of religious persecution to suggest that 
a Jew very probably comes of a Jewish fam- 
ily. In short, the modern English, while 
their rulers are willing to give due consider- 
ation to Eugenics as a reasonable opportu- 
nity for various forms of polygamy and in- 
fanticide, are drifting farther and farther 
from the only consideration of Eugenics that 
could possibly be fit for Christian men, the 
consideration of it as an accomplished fact. 
I have spoken of infanticide; but indeed the 
ethic involved is rather that of parricide and 
matricide. To my own taste, the present 
tendency of social reform would seem to con- 
sist of destroying all traces of the parents, in 
order to study the heredity of the children. 
But I do not here ask the reader to accept my 



The Family and the Feud 61 

own tastes or even opinions about these things; 
I only bear witness to an objective fact about 
a foreign country. It can be summed up by 
saying that Parnell is the Parnell for the 
English; but a Parnell for the Irish. 

This is what I mean when I say that Eng- 
lish Home Rulers do not know what the Irish 
mean by home. And this is also what I mean 
when I say that the society does not fit into 
any of our social classifications, liberal or con- 
servative. To many Radicals this sense of 
lineage will appear rank reactionary aristoc- 
racy. And it is aristocratic, if we mean by 
this a pride of pedigree; but it is not aristo- 
cratic in the practical and political sense. 
Strange as it may sound, its practical effect 
is democratic. It is not aristocratic in the 
sense of creating an aristocracy. On the con- 
trary, it is perhaps the one force that perma- 
nently prevents the creation of an aristocracy, 
in the manner of the English squirearchy. 
The reason of this apparent paradox can be 
put plainly enough in one sentence. If you 
are really concerned about your relations, you 
have to be concerned about your poor rela- 



62 Irish Impressions 

tions. You soon discover that a considerable 
number of your second cousins exhibit a 
strong social tendency to be chimney-sweeps 
and tinkers. You soon learn the lesson of hu- 
man equality if you try honestly and consist- 
ently to learn any other lesson, even the les- 
son of heraldry and genealogy. For good or 
evil, a real v^orking aristocracy has to forget 
about three-quarters of its aristocrats. It has 
to discard the poor who have the genteel 
blood, and welcome the rich who can live the 
genteel life. If a man is interesting because 
he is a McCarthy, it is, so far, as he is inter- 
esting because he is a man; that is, he is in- 
teresting whether he is a duke or a dustman. 
But if he is interesting because he is Lord 
FitzArthur and lives at FitzArthur House, 
then he is interesting when he has merely 
bought the house, or when he has merely 
bought the title. To maintain a squirearchy, 
it is necessary to admire the new squire; and 
therefore to forget the old squire. The sense 
of family is like a dog and follows the family; 
the sense of oligarchy is like a cat and con- 
tinues to haunt the house. I am not arguing 



The Family and the Feud 63 

against aristocracy if the English choose to 
preserve it in England; I am only making 
clear the terms on which they hold it, and 
warning them that a people with a strong 
family sense will not hold it on any terms. 
Aristocracy, as it has flourished in England 
since the Reformation, with not a little na- 
tional glory and commercial success, is in its 
very nature built up of broken and desecrated 
homes. It has to destroy a hundred poor re- 
lations to keep up a family. It has to destroy 
a hundred families to keep up a class. 

But if this family spirit is incompatible 
with what we mean by aristocracy, it is quite 
as incompatible with three-quarters of what 
many men praise and preach as democracy. 
The whole trend of what has been regarded 
as liberal legislation in England, necessary or 
unnecessary, defensible and indefensible, has 
for good or evil been at the expense of the 
independence of the family, especially of the 
poor family. From the first most reasonable 
restraints of the Factory Acts to the last most 
maniacal antics of interference with other 
people's nursery games or Christmas dinners, 



64 Irish Impressions 

the whole process has turned sometimes on 
the pivot of the state, more often on the pivot 
of the employer, but never on the pivot of the 
home. All this may be an emancipation; I 
only point out that Ireland really asked for 
Home Rule chiefly to be emancipated from 
this emancipation. But indeed the English 
politicians, to do them justice, show their con- 
sciousness of this by the increasing number of 
cases in which the other nation is exempted. 
We may have harried this unhappy people 
with our persecutions; but at least we spare 
them our reforms. We have smitten them 
with plagues; but at least we dare not scourge 
them with our remedies. The real case 
against the Union is not merely a case against 
the Unionists; it is a far stronger case against 
the Universalists. It is this strange and ironic 
truth; that a man stands up holding a char- 
ter of charity and peace for all mankind; 
that he lays down a law of enlightened jus- 
tice for all the nations of the earth, that he 
claims to behold man from the beginnings of 
his evolution equal, without any difference 



The Family and the Feud 65 

between the most distant creeds and colours; 
that he stands as the orator of the human race 
whose statute only declares all humanity to 
be human; and then slightly drops his voice 
and says, "This Act shall not apply to Ire- 
land." 



IV — The Paradox of Labour 



MY first general and visual impression 
of the green island was that it was 
not green but brown; that it was 
positively brown with khaki. This 
is one of those experiences that cannot be con- 
fused with expectations; the sort of small 
thing that is seen but not foreseen in the ver- 
bal visions of books and newspapers. I knew, 
of course, that we had a garrison in Dublin, 
but I had no notion that it was so obvious all 
over Dublin. I had no notion that it had 
been considered necessary to occupy the coun- 
try in such force, or with so much parade 
of force. And the first thought that flashed 
through my mind found words in the single 
sentence : " How useful these men would 
have been in the breach at St. Quentin." 

For I went to Dublin towards the end of 
1918, and not long after those awful days 



The Paradox of Labour 67 

which led up to the end of the war, and 
seemed more like the end of the world. There 
hung still in the imagination, as above a void 
of horror, that line that was the last chain of 
the w^orld's chivalry; and the memory of the 
day when it seemed that our name and our 
greatness and our glory went down before the 
annihilation from the north. Ireland is 
hardly to blame if she has never known how 
noble an England was in peril in that hour; 
or for what beyond any empire we were trou- 
bled, when, under a cloud of thick darkness, 
we almost felt her ancient foundations move 
upon the floor of the sea. But I, as an Eng- 
lishman at least, knew it; and it was for Eng- 
land and not for Ireland that I felt this first 
impatience and tragic irony. I had always 
doubted the military policy that culminated 
in Irish conscription, and merely on military 
grounds. If any policy of the English could 
deserve to be called in the pit)verbial sense 
Irish, I think it was this one. It was wast- 
ing troops in Ireland because we wanted 
them in France. I had the same purely pa- 
triotic and even pugnacious sense of annoy- 



68 Irish Impressions 

ance, mingling with my sense of pathos, in 
the sight of the devastation of the great Dub- 
lin street, which had been bombarded by the 
British troops during the Easter Rebellion. 
I was distressed that such a cannonade had 
ever been aimed at the Irish; but even more 
distressed that it had not been aimed at the 
Germans. The question of the necessity of 
the heavy attack, like the question of the ne- 
cessity of the large army of occupation, is of 
course bound up with the history of the Easter 
Rebellion itself. That strange and dramatic 
event, which came quite as unexpectedly to 
Nationalist Ireland as to Unionist England, 
is no part of my own experiences, and I will 
not dogmatise on so dark a problem. But I 
will say in passing that I suspect a certain 
misunderstanding of its very nature to be com- 
mon on both sides. Everything seems to 
point to the paradox that the rebels needed 
the less to be conquered, because they were 
actually aiming at being conquered, rather 
than at being conquerors. In the moral sense! 
they were certainly heroes, but I doubt if they 
expected to be conquering heroes. They de- 



It 



The Paradox of Labour 69 

sired to be in the Greek and literal sense mar- 
tyrs; they wished not so much to win as to 
witness. They thought that nothing but their 
dead bodies could really prove that Ireland 
was not dead. How far this sublime and 
suicidal ideal was really useful in reviving 
national enthusiasm, it is for Irishmen to 
judge; I should have said that the enthusiasm 
was there anyhow. But if any such action is 
based on international hopes, as they affect 
England or a great part of America, it seems 
to me it is founded on a fallacy about the facts. 
I shall have occasion to note many English 
errors about the Irish; and this seems to me 
a very notable Irish error about the English. 
If we are often utterly mistaken about their 
mentality, they were quite equally mistaken 
about our mistake. And curiously enough, 
they failed through not knowing the one com- 
pliment that we had really always paid them. 
Their act presupposed that Irish courage 
needed proof; and it never did. I have 
heard all the most horrible nonsense talked 
against Ireland before the war; and I never 
heard Englishmen doubt Irish military val- 



70 Irish Impressions 

our. What they did doubt was Irish polit- 
ical sanity. It will be seen at once that the 
Easter action could only disprove the preju- 
dice they hadn't got; and actually confirmed 
the prejudice they had got. The charge 
against the Irishman was not a lack of bold- 
ness, but rather an excess of it. Men were 
right in thinking him brave, and they could 
not be more right. But they were wrong in 
thinking him mad, and they had an excellent 
opportunity to be more wrong. Then, when 
the attempt to fight against England devel- 
oped by its own logic into a refusal to fight 
for England, men took away the number they 
first thought of; and were irritated into deny- 
ing what they had originally never dreamed 
of doubting. In any case, this was, I think, 
the temper in which the minority of the true 
Sinn Feiners sought martyrdom. I for one 
will never sneer at such a motive ; but it would 
hardly have amounted to so great a move- 
ment but for another force that happened to 
ally itself with them. It is for the sake of 
this that I have here begun with the Easter 
tragedy itself; for with the consideration of 



The Paradox of Labour 7l 

this we come to the paradox of Irish Labour. 
Some of my remarks on the stability and 
even repose of a peasant society may seem ex- 
aggerated in the light of a Labour agitation 
that breaks out in Ireland as elsewhere. But 
I have particular and even personal reasons 
for regarding that agitation as the exception 
that proves the rule. It was the background 
of the peasant landscape that made the Dub- 
lin strike the peculiar sort of drama that it 
was; and this operated in two ways: first, by 
isolating the industrial capitalist as something 
exceptional and almost fanatical; and second, 
by reinforcing the proletariat with a vague 
tradition of property. My own sympathies 
were all with Larkin and Connolly as against 
the late Mr. Murphy; but it is curious to 
note that even Mr. Murphy was quite a dif- 
ferent kind of man from the Lord Something 
who is the head of a commercial combine in 
England. He was much more like some 
morbid prince of the fifteenth century, full of 
cold anger, not without perverted piety. But 
the first few words I heard about him in Ire- 
land were full of that vast, vague fact which 



72 Irish Impressions 

I have tried to put first among my impres- 
sions. I have called it the family; but it cov- 
ers many cognate things: youth and old 
friendships, not to mention old quarrels. It 
might be more fully defined as a realism 
about origins. The first things I heard about 
Murphy were facts of his forgotten youth, 
or a youth that would in England have been 
forgotten. They were tales about friends of 
his poorer days, with whom he had set out 
to push some more or less sentimental ven- 
detta against somebody. Suppose whenever 
we talked of Harrod's Stores we heard first 
about the boyish day-dreams of Harrod. 
Suppose the mention of Bradshaw's Railway 
Guide brought up tales of feud and first love 
in the early life of Mr. Bradshaw, or even of 
Mrs. Bradshaw. That is the atmosphere, to 
be felt rather than described, that a stranger 
in Ireland feels around him. English jour- 
nalism and gossip, dealing with English busi- 
ness men, are often precise about the present 
and prophetic about the future, but seldom 
communicative about the past; et pour cause. 
They will tell us where the capitalist is going 



The Paradox of Labour 73 

to, as to the House of Lords, or to Monte 
Carlo, or inf erentially to heaven ; but they say 
as little as possible about where he comes 
from. In Ireland a man carries the family 
mansion about with him like a snail ; and his 
father's ghost follows him like his shadow. 
Everything good and bad that could be said 
was said, not only about Murphy but about 
Murphys. An anecdote of the old Irish Par- 
liament describes an orator as gracefully al- 
luding to the presence of an opponent's sis- 
ter in the Ladies' Gallery, by praying that 
wrath overtake the whole accursed generation 
" from the toothless old hag who is grinning 
in the gallery to the white-livered poltroon 
who is shivering on the floor." The story is 
commonly told as suggesting the rather wild 
disunion of Irish parties; but it is quite as 
serious a suggestion of the union of Irish fam- 
ilies. 

As a matter of fact, the great Dublin 
Strike, a conflagration of which the embers 
were still glowing at the time of my visit, in- 
volved another episode which illustrates once 
again this recurrent principle of the reality of 



74 Irish Impressions 

the family in Ireland. Some English Social- 
ists, it may be remembered, moved by an hon- 
ourable pity for the poor families starving 
during the strike, made a proposal for taking 
the children away and feeding them properly 
in England. I should have thought the more 
natural course would have been to give money 
or food to the parents. But the philan- 
thropists, being English and being Socialists, 
probably had a trust in what is called organ- 
isation and a distrust of what is called char- 
ity. It is supposed that charity makes a man 
dependent; though in fact charity makes him 
independent, as compared with the dreary 
dependence usually produced by organisation. 
Charity gives property, and therefore liberty. 
There is manifestly much more emancipation 
in giving a beggar a shilling to spend, than 
in sending an official after him to spend it for 
him. The Socialists, however, had placidly 
arranged for the deportation of all the poor 
children, when they found themselves, to their 
astonishment, confronted with the red-hot 
reality called the religion of Ireland. The 
priests and the families of the faithful organ- 



The Paradox of Labour 75 

ised themselves for a furious agitation, on the 
ground that the faith would be lost in for- 
eign and heretical homes. They were not 
satisfied with the assurance, which some of 
the Socialists earnestly offered, that the faith 
would not be tampered with ; and as a matter 
of clear thinking, I think they were quite 
right. Those who offer such a reassurance 
have never thought about what a religion is. 
They entertain the extraordinary idea that re- 
ligion is a topic. They think religion is a 
thing like radishes, which can be avoided 
throughout a particular conversation with a 
particular person, whom the mention of a 
radish may convulse with anger or agony. 
But a religion is simply the world a man 
inhabits. In practice, a Socialist living in 
Liverpool would not know when he was, or 
was not tampering with the religion of a child 
born in Louth. If I were given the complete 
control of an infant Parsee (which is fortu- 
nately unlikely) I should not have the remot- 
est notion of when I was most vitally reflect- 
ing on the Parsee system. But common 
sense, and a comprehension of the meaning 



76 Irish Impressions 

of a coherent philosophy, would lead me to 
suspect that I was reflecting on it every other 
minute. But I mention the matter here, not 
in order to enter into any of these disputes, 
but to give yet another example of the way 
in which the essentially domestic organisation 
of Ireland will always rise in rebellion against 
any other organisation. There is something 
of a parable in the tales of the old evictions, 
in which the whole family was besieged and 
resisted together and the mothers emptied 
boiling kettles on the besiegers; for any offi- 
cial who interferes with them will certainly 
get into hot water. We cannot separate 
mothers and children in that strange land; 
we can only return to some of our older his- 
torical methods, and massacre them together. 
A small incident within my own short ex- 
perience, however, illustrated the main point 
involved here; the sense of a peasant base, 
even of the proletarian attack. And this was 
exemplified not in any check to Labour, 
but rather in a success for Labour, in so 
far as the issue of a friendly and informal 
debate may be classed with its more solid sue- 



The Paradox of Labour 77 

cesses. The business originally began with a 
sort of loose-jointed literary lecture which I 
gave in the Dublin Theatre, in connection 
with which I only mention two incidents in 
passing, because they both struck me as pecu- 
liarly native and national. One concerned 
only the title of my address, which was 
" Poetry and Property." An educated Eng- 
lish gentleman, who happened to speak to me 
before the meeting, said with the air of one 
who foresees that such jokes will be the death 
of him, ^^ Well, I have simply given up puz- 
zling about what you can possibly mean, by 
talking about poetry as something to do with 
property." He probably regarded the com- 
bination of words as a mere alliterative fan- 
tasy, like Peacocks and Paddington, or Polyg- 
amy and Potatoes ; if indeed he did not regard 
it as a mere combination of incompatible con- 
trasts, like Popery and Protestants, or Patriot- 
ism and Politicians. On the same day an 
Irishman of similar social standing remarked 
quite carelessly, " I've just seen your subject 
for to-morrow. I suppose the Socialists won't 
agree with you," or words to that effect. The 



78 Irish Impressions 

two terms told him at once, not about the lec- 
ture (which was literary if it was anything), 
but about the whole philosophy underlying 
the lecture; the whole of that philosophy 
which the lumbering elephant called by Mr. 
Shaw the Chester-Belloc laboriously toils to 
explain in England, under the ponderous 
title of Distributivism. As Mr. Hugh Law 
once said, equally truly, about our pitting of 
patriotism against imperialism, " What is a 
paradox in England is a commonplace in Ire- 
land." My actual monologue, however, dealt 
merely with the witness of poetry to a certain 
dignit}'' in man's sense of private possessions, 
which is certainly not either vulgar ostenta- 
tion or vulgar greed. The French poet of 
the Pleiade remembers the slates on his own 
roof almost as if he could count them; and 
Mr. W. B. Yeats, in the very wildest vision 
of a loneliness remote and irresponsible, is 
careful to make it clear that he knows how 
many bean-rows make nine. Of course there 
were people of all parties in the theatre, wild 
Sinn Feiners and conventional Unionists, but 
they all listened to my remarks as naturally 



The Paradox of Labour 1% 

as they might have all listened to an equally 
incompetent lecture on Monkeys or on the 
Mountains of the Moon. There was not a 
word of politics, least of all party politics, ia 
that particular speech; it was concerned with 
a tradition in art, or at the most, in abstract 
ethics. But the one amusing thing which 
makes me recall the whole incident was this; 
that when I had finished, a stalwart, hearty, 
heavy sort of legal gentleman, a well-known 
Irish judge I understand, was kind enough to 
move a vote of thanks to me. And what 
amused me about him was this : that while I, 
who am a Radical in sympathy with the rev- 
olutionary legend, had delivered a mild essay 
on minor poets to a placid if bored audience, 
the judge, who was a pillar of the Castle and 
a Conservative sworn to law and order, pro- 
ceeded with the utmost energy and joy to raise 
a riot. He taunted the Sinn Feiners and 
dared them to come out; he trailed his coat 
if ever a man trailed it in this world ; he glori- 
fied England; not the Allies, but England; 
splendid England, sublime England (all in 
the broadest brogue), just, wise, and merciful 



80 Irish Impressions 

England, and so on, flourishing what was not 
even the flag of his own country, and a thing 
that had not the remotest connection with the 
subject in hand, any more than the Great 
Wall of China. I need not say that the thea- 
tre was soon in a roar of protests and repar- 
tees; which I suppose was what he wanted. 
He was a jolly old gentleman; and I liked 
him. But what interested me about him was 
this; and it is of some importance in the un- 
derstanding of his nationality. That sort of 
man exists in England; I know and like scores 
of him. Often he is a major; often a squire; 
sometimes a judge; very occasionally a dean. 
Such a man talks the most ridiculous reaction- 
ary nonsense in an apoplectic fashion over his 
own port wine; and occasionally in a some- 
what gasping manner at an avowedly polit- 
ical meeting. But precisely what the English 
gentleman would not do, and the Irish gen- 
tleman did do, w^ould be to make a scene on 
a non-political occasion; when all he had to 
do was to move a formal vote of thanks to a 
total stranger who was talking about Ithaca 
and Innisfree. An English Conservative 



The Paradox of Labour 81 

would be less likely to do it than an English 
Radical. The same thing that makes him 
conventionally political would make him con- 
ventionally non-political. He would hate to 
make too serious a speech on too social an 
occasion, as he would hate to be in morning- 
dress when every one else was in evening- 
dress. And whatever coat he wore he cer- 
tainly would not trail it solely in order to make 
a disturbance, as did that jolly Irish judge. 
He taught me that the Irishman is never so 
Irish, as when he is English. He was very 
like some of the Sinn Feiners who shouted 
him down ; and he would be pleased to know 
that he helped me to understand them with 
a greater sympathy. 

I have wandered from the subject in speak- 
ing of this trifle, thinking it worth while to 
note the positive and provocative quality of 
all Irish opinion; but it was my purpose only 
to mention this small dispute as leading up 
to another. I had some further talk about 
poetry and property with Mr. Yeats at the 
Dublin Arts Club; and here again I am 
tempted to irrelevant, but for me interesting 



82 Irish Impressions 

matters. For I am conscious throughout of 
saying less than I could wish of a thousand 
things, my omission of which is not altogether 
thoughtless, far less thankless. There have 
been and will be better sketches than mine of 
all that attractive society, the paradox of an 
intelligentsia that is intelligent. I could write 
a great deal, not only about those I value as 
my own friends, like Katherine Tynan or 
Stephen Gwynn, but about men with whom 
my meeting was all too momentary; about the 
elvish energy conveyed by Mr. James Ste- 
phens; the social greatness of Dr. Gogarty, 
who was like a literary legend of the eight- 
eenth century; of the unique universalism of 
A. E., who has something of the presence of 
William Morris, and a more transcendental 
type of the spiritual hospitality of Walt Whit- 
man. But I am not in this rough sketch try- 
ing to tell Irishmen what they know already, 
but trying to tell Englishmen some of the 
large and simple things that they do not know. 
The large matter concerned here is Labour; 
and I have only paused upon the other points 
because they were the steps which accidentally 



The Paradox of Labour 83 

led up to my first meeting with this great 
force. And it was none the less a fact in sup- 
port of my argument, because it was some- 
thing of a joke against myself. 

On the occasion I have mentioned, a most 
exhilarating evening at the Arts Club, Mr. 
Yeats asked me to open a debate at the Abbey 
Theatre, defending property on its more 
purely political side. My opponent was one 
of the ablest of the leaders of Liberty Hall, 
the famous stronghold of Labour politics in 
Dublin, Mr. Johnson, an Englishman like my- 
self, but one deservedly popular with the pro- 
letarian Irish. He made a most admirable 
speech, to which I mean no disparagement 
when I say that I think his personal popu- 
larity had even more weight than his personal 
eloquence. My own argument was confined 
to the particular value of small property as 
a weapon of militant democracy; and was 
based on the idea that the citizen resisting 
injustice could find no substitute for private 
property, for every other impersonal power, 
however democratic in theory, must be bu- 
reaucratic in form. I said, as a flippant fig- 



84 Irish Impressions 

ure of speech, that committing property to 
any ofBcials, even guild officials, was like hav- 
ing to leave one's legs in the cloakroom along 
w^ith one's stick or umbrella. The point is 
that a man may w^ant his legs at any minute, 
to kick a man or to dance WiXh a lady; and 
recovering them may be postponed by any 
hitch, from the loss of the ticket to the crim- 
inal flight of the official. So in a social cri- 
sis, such as a strike, a man must be ready to 
act w^ithout officials who may hamper or be- 
tray him; and I asked whether many more 
strikes w^ould not have been successful, if each 
striker had owned so much as a kitchen gar- 
den to help him to live. My opponent re- 
plied that he had always been in favour of 
such a reserve of proletarian property, but 
preferred it to be communal rather than indi- 
vidual; which seems to me to leave my argu- 
ment where it was; for what is communal 
must be official, unless it is to be chaotic. 
Two minor jokes, somewhat at my expense, 
remain in my memory; I appear to have 
caused some amusement by cutting a pencil 
with a very large Spanish knife, which I 



The Paradox of Labour 85 

value (as it happens) as the gift of an Irish 
priest who is a friend of mine, and which may 
therefore also be regarded as a symbolic 
weapon, a sort of sword of the spirit. Whether 
the audience thought I was about to ampu- 
tate my own legs in illustration of my own 
metaphor, or that I was going to cut Mr. 
Johnson's throat in fury at finding no reply 
to his arguments, I do not know. The other 
thing which struck me as funny was an excel- 
lent retort by Mr. Johnson himself, who had 
said something about the waste of property on 
guns, and who interrupted my remark that 
there would never be a good revolution with- 
out guns, by humorously calling out, " Trea- 
son." As I told him afterwards, few scenes 
would be more artistic than that of an Eng- 
lishman, sent over to recruit for the British 
army, being collared and given up to justice 
(or injustice) by a Pacifist from Liberty 
Hall. But all throughout the proceedings I 
was conscious, as I say, of a very real popular 
feeling supporting the mere personality of my 
opponent; as in the ovation he received before 
he spoke at all, or the applause given to a 



86 Irish Impressions 

number of his topical asides, allusions which 
I could not always understand. After the 
meeting a distinguished Southern Unionist, 
who happens to own land outside Dublin, said 
to me, " Of course, Johnson has just had a 
huge success in his work here. Liberty Hall 
has just done something that has really never 
been done before in the whole Trade Union 
movement. He has really managed to start 
a Trade Union for agricultural labourers. I 
know, because I've had to meet their demands. 
You know how utterly impossible it has al- 
ways been really to found a union of agricul- 
tural labourers in England." I did know it; 
and I also knew why it had been possible to 
found one in Ireland. It had been possible 
for the very reason I had been urging all the 
evening; that behind the Irish proletariat 
there had been the tradition of an Irish peas- 
antry. In their families, if not in themselves, 
there had been some memory of the personal 
love of the land. But it seemed to me an in- 
teresting irony that even my own defeat was 
an example of my own doctrine ; and that the 
truth on my side was proved by the popular- 



The Paradox of Labour 87 

ity of the other side. The agricultural guild 
was due to a wind of freedom that came into 
that dark city from very distant fields; and 
the truth that even these rolling stones of 
homeless proletarianism had been so lately 
loosened from the very roots of the moun- 
tains. 

In Ireland even the industrialism is not in- 
dustrial. That is what I mean by saying that 
Irish Labour is the exception that proves the 
rule. That is why it does not contradict my 
former generalisation that our capitalist crisis 
is on the English side of the road. The Irish 
agricultural labourers can become guildsmen 
because they would like to become peasants. 
They think of rich and poor in the manner 
that is as old as the world; the manner of 
Ahab and Naboth. It matters little in a peas- 
ant society whether Ahab takes the vineyard 
privately as Ahab or officially as King of 
Israel. It will matter as little in the long 
run, even in the other kind of society, whether 
Naboth has a wage to work in the vineyard, 
or a vote that is supposed in some way to af- 
fect the vineyard. What he desires to have is 



88 Irish Impressions 

the vineyard; and not in apologetic cynicism 
or vulgar evasions that business is business, 
but in thunder, as from a secret throne comes 
the awful voice out of the vineyard ; the voice 
of this manner of man in every age and na- 
tion: "The Lord forbid that I should give 
the inheritance of my fathers unto thee." 



V — The Englishman in Ireland 

WITH no desire to decorate my 
travels with too tall a traveller's 
tale, I must record the fact that 
I found one point upon which all 
Irishmen were agreed. It was the fact that, 
for some reason or other, there had been a 
very hopeful beginning of Irish volunteer- 
ing at the beginning of the war; and that, for 
some reason or other, this had failed in the 
course of the war. The reasons alleged dif- 
fered widely with the moods of men; some 
had regarded the beginnings with hope and 
some with suspicion; some had lived to re- 
gard the failure with a bitter pleasure, and 
some with a generous pain. The different 
factions gave different explanations of why 
the thing had stopped; but they all agreed 
that it had begun. The Sinn Feiner said that 
the people soon found they had been lured 

89 



90 Irish Impressions 

into a Saxon trap, set for them by smooth, 
subservient Saxons like Mr. Devlin and Mr. 
Tim Healy. The Belfast citizen suggested 
that the Popish priest had terrorised the peas- 
ants when they tried to enlist, producing a 
thumbscrew from his pocket and a portable 
rack from his handbag. The Parliamentary 
Nationalist blamed both Sinn Fein and the 
persecution of Sinn Fein. The British Gov- 
ernment officials, if they did not exactly blame 
themselves, at least blamed each other. The 
ordinary Southern Unionist (who played 
many parts of a more or less sensible sort, in- 
cluding that of a Home Ruler) generally 
agreed with the ordinary Nationalist that the 
Government's recruiting methods had been as 
bad as its cause was good. But it is manifest 
that multitudes at the beginning of the war 
thought it really had a very good cause ; and 
moreover a very good chance. 

The extraordinary story of how that chance 
was lost may find mention on a later page. 
I will begin by touching on the first incident 
that befell me personally in connection with 
the same enterprise. I went to Ireland at the 



The Englishman in Ireland 91 

request of Irish friends who were working 
warmly for the Allied cause, and who con- 
ceived (I fear in far too flattering a spirit) 
that I might at least be useful as an English- 
man who had always sympathised as warmly 
with the Irish cause. I am under no illusions 
that I should ever be efficient at such work 
in any case; and under the circumstances I 
had no great hopes of doing much, where men 
like Sir Horace Plunkett and Captain Ste- 
phen Gwynne, far more competent, more self- 
sacrificing, and more well-informed than I, 
could already do comparatively little. It was 
too late. A hundredth part of the brilliant 
constancy and tragic labours of these men 
might easily, at the beginning of the war, 
have given us a great Irish army. I need 
not explain the motives that made me do the 
little I could do; they were the same that at 
that moment made millions of better men do 
masses of better work. Physical accident pre- 
vented my being useful in France, and a sort 
of psychological accident seemed to suggest 
that I might possibly be useful in Ireland; 
but I did not see myself as a very serious 



92 Irish Impressions 

figure in either field. Nothing could be seri- 
ous in such a case except perhaps a convic- 
tion; and at least my conviction about the 
great war has never v^avered by a hair. 
Delenda est — and it is typical of the power of 
Berlin that one must break off for want of a 
Latin name for it. Being an Englishman, I 
hoped primarily to help England; but not 
being a congenital idiot, I did not primarily 
ask an Irishman to help England. There was 
obviously something much more reasonable 
to ask him to do. I hope I should in any 
case have done my best for my own country. 
But the cause was more than any country; 
in a sense it was too good for any country. 
The Allies were more right than they real- 
ised. Nay, they hardly had a right to be so 
right as they were. The modern Babylon of 
capitalistic states was hardly worthy to go on 
such a crusade against the heathen; as per- 
haps decadent Byzantium was hardly worthy 
to defend the Cross against the Crescent. But 
we are glad that it did defend the Cross 
against the Crescent. Nobody is sorry that 
Sobieski relieved Vienna ; nobody wishes that 



The Englishman in Ireland 93 

Alfred had not won in Wessex. The cause 
that conquered is the only cause that survived. 
We see now that its enemy was not a cause 
but a chaos; and that is what history will say 
of the strange and recent boiling up of bar- 
baric imperialism, a whirlpool whose hollow 
centre was Berlin. This is where the extreme 
Irish were really wrong; perhaps really 
wrong for the first time. I entirely sympa- 
thise with their being in revolt against the 
British Government. I am in revolt in most 
ways against the British Government myself. 
But politics are a fugitive thing in the face 
of history. Does anybody want to be fixed 
for ever on the wrong side at the Battle of 
Marathon, through a quarrel with some 
Archon whose very name is forgotten? Does 
anybody want to be remembered as a friend 
of Attila, through a breach of friendship with 
iEtius? In any case, it was with a profound 
conviction that if Prussia won, Europe must 
perish, and that if Europe perished England 
and Ireland must perish together, that I went 
to Dublin in those dark days of the last year 
of the war; and it so happened that the first 



94 Irish Impressions 

occasion when I was called upon for any ex- 
pression of opinion was at a very pleasant 
luncheon party given to the representatives of 
the British Dominions, who were then on an 
official tour in the country inspecting its con- 
ditions. What I said is of no importance 
except as leading up to later events; but it 
may be noted that though I was speaking 
perhaps indirectly to Irishmen, I was speak- 
ing directly, if not to Englishmen, at least to 
men in the more English tradition of the ma- 
jority of the Colonies. I was speaking, if not 
to Unionists, at least largely to Imperialists. 
Now I have forgotten, I am happy to say, 
the particular speech that I made, but I can 
repeat the upshot of it here, not only as part 
of the argument, but as part of the story. 
The line I took generally in Ireland was an 
appeal to the Irish principle, yet the reverse 
of a mere approval of the Irish action, or in- 
action. It postulated that while the English 
had missed a great opportunity of justifying 
themselves to the Irish, the Irish had also 
missed a similar opportunity of justifying 
themselves to the English. But it specially 



The Englishman in Ireland 95 

emphasised this ; that what had been lost was 
not primarily a justification against England, 
but a joke against England. I pointed out 
that an Irishman missing a joke against an 
Englishman was a tragedy, like a lost battle. 
And there was one thing, and one thing only, 
which had stopped the Irishman from laugh- 
ing, and saved the Englishman from being 
laughable. The one and only thing that res- 
cued England from ridicule was Sinn Fein. 
Or, at any rate, that element in Sinn Fein 
which was pro-German, or refused to be 
anti-German. Nothing imaginable under the 
stars except a pro-German Irishman could at 
that moment have saved the face of a (very 
recently) pro-German Englishman. 

The reason for this is obvious enough. 
England in 1914 encountered or discovered 
a colossal crime of Prussianised Germany. 
But England could not discover the German 
crime without discovering the English blun- 
der. The blunder was, of course, a perfectly 
plain historical fact; that England made 
Prussia. England was the historic, highly 
civilised western state, with Roman founda- 



96 Irish Impressions 

tions and chivalric memories; Prussia was 
originally a petty and boorish principality 
used by England and Austria in the long 
struggle against the greatness of France. 
Now in that long struggle Ireland had always 
been on the side of France. She had only 
to go on being on the side of France, and the 
Latin tradition generally, to behold her own 
truth triumph over her own enemies. In a 
word, it was not a question of whether Ire- 
land should become anti-German, but merely 
of whether she should continue to be anti- 
German. It was a question of whether she 
should suddenly become pro-German, at the 
moment when most other pro-Germans were 
discovering that she had been justified all 
along. But England, at the beginning of her 
last and most lamentable quarrel with Ire- 
land, was by no means in so strong a contro- 
versial position. England was right; but she 
could only prove she was right by proving 
she was wrong. In one sense, and with all 
respect to her right action in the matter, she 
had to be ridiculous in order to be right. 
But the joke against the English was even 



The Englishman in Ireland 97 

more obvious and topical. And as mine was 
only meant for a light speech after a friendly 
lunch, I took the joke in its lightest and most 
fanciful form, and touched chiefly on the fan- 
tastic theory of the Teuton as the master of 
the Celt. For the supreme joke was this: 
that the Englishman has not only boasted of 
being an Englishman; he has actually boasted 
of being a German. As the modern mind 
began to doubt the superiority of Calvinism 
to Catholicism, all English books, papers, and 
speeches were filled more and more with a 
Teutonism which substituted a racial for a 
religious superiority. It was felt to be a more 
modern and even a more progressive prin- 
ciple of distinction, to insist on ethnology 
rather than theology; for ethnology was sup- 
posed to be a science. Unionism was simply 
founded on Teutonism. Hence the ordinary 
honest, patriotic Unionist was in a highly hu- 
morous fix, when he had suddenly to begin 
denouncing Teutonism as mere terrorism. 
If all superiority belonged to the Teuton, the 
supreme superiority must clearly belong to 
the most Teutonic Teuton. If I claim the 



98 Irish Impressions 

right to kick Mr. Bernard Shaw on the spe- 
cific ground that I am fatter than he is, it is 
obvious that I look rather a fool if I am sud- 
denly kicked by somebody who is fatter still. 
When the earth shakes under the advancing 
form of one coming against me out of the east 
who is fatter than I (for I called upon the 
Irish imagination to embrace so monstrous a 
vision), it is clear that whatever my relations 
to the rest of the world, in my relations to 
Mr. Bernard Shaw I am rather at a disadvan- 
tage. Mr. Shaw, at any rate, is rather in a 
position to make game of me; of which it is 
not inconceivable that he might avail himself. 
I might have accumulated a vast mass of 
learned sophistries and journalistic catch- 
words, which had always seemed to me to 
justify the connection between waxing fat and 
kicking. I might have proved from history 
that the leaders had always been fat men, like 
William the Conqueror, St. Thomas Aquinas, 
and Charles Fox. I might have proved from 
physiology that fatness is a proof of the power 
of organic assimilation and digestion ; or from 
comparative zoology that the elephant is the 



The Englishman in Ireland 99 

wisest of the beasts. In short, I might be 
able to adduce many arguments in favour of 
my position. Only, unfortunately, they would 
now all become arguments against my posi- 
tion. Everything I had ever urged against 
my old enemy could be urged much more 
forcibly against me by my new enemy. And 
my position touching the great adipose theory 
would be exactly like England's position 
touching the equally sensible Teutonic the- 
ory. If Teutonism was creative culture, then 
on our own showing the German was better 
than the Englishman. If Teutonism was bar- 
barism, then on our own showing the Eng- 
lishman was more barbaric than the Irishman. 
The real answer, of course, is that we were 
not Teutons but only the dupes of Teutonism; 
but some were so wholly duped that they 
would do anything rather than own them- 
selves dupes. These unfortunates, while they 
are already ashamed of being Teutons, are 
still proud of not being Celts. 

There is only one thing that could save my 
dignity in such an undignified fix as I have 
fancied here. It is that Mr. Bernard Shaw 



100 Irish Impressions 

himself should come to my rescue. It is that 
Mr. Bernard Shaw himself should declare in 
favour of the corpulent conqueror from the 
east; that he should take seriously all the fads 
and fallacies of that fat-headed superman. 
That, and that alone, would ensure all my 
own fads and fallacies being not only for- 
gotten but forgiven. There is present to my 
imagination, I regret to say, a wild possibility 
that this is what Mr. Bernard Shaw might 
really do. Anyhow, this is what a certain 
number of his countrymen really did. It will 
be apparent, I think, from these pages that I 
do not believe in the stage Irishman. I am 
under no delusion that the Irishman is soft- 
headed and sentimental, or even illogical and 
inconsequent. Nine times out of ten, the 
Irishman is not only more clear-headed, but 
even more cool-headed than the Englishman. 
But I think it is true, as Mr. Max Beerbohm 
once suggested to me in connection with Mr. 
Shaw himself, that there is a residual per- 
versity in the Irishman, which comes after 
and not before the analysis of a question 
There is at the last moment a cold impatience 



The Englishman in Ireland 101 

in the intellect, an irony which returns on 
itself and rends itself; the subtlety of a sui- 
cide. However this may be, some of the lean 
men, instead of making a fool of the fat man, 
did begin almost to make a hero of the fatter 
man; to admire his vast curves as almost cos- 
mic lines of development. I have seen Irish- 
American pamphlets which took quite seri- 
ously (or, I prefer to think, pretended to take 
quite seriously) the ridiculous romance about 
the Teutonic tribes having revived and 
refreshed civilisation after the fall of the 
Roman Empire. They revived civilisation 
very much as they restored Louvain or recon- 
structed the Lusitania, It was a romance 
which the English for a short time adopted 
as a convenience, but from which the Irish 
have continually suffered as from a curse. 
It was a suicidal perversity that they them- 
selves, in their turn, should perpetuate their 
permanent curse as a temporary convenience. 
That was the worst error of the Irish, or of 
some of the best of the Irish. That is why 
the Easter Rising was really a black and in- 
sane blunder. It was not because it involved 



102 Irish Impressions 

the Irish In a military defeat; it was because 
it lost the Irish a great controversial victory. 
The rebel deliberately let the tyrant out of 
a trap; out of the grinning jaws of the gigan- 
tic trap of a joke. 

Many of the most extreme Nationalists 
knew this well; it was what Kettle probably 
meant when he suggested an Anglo-Irish his- 
tory called " The Two Fools " ; and of course 
I do not mean that. I said all this in my 
very casual and rambling speech. But it was 
based on this idea, that men had missed the 
joke against England, and that now unfortu- 
nately the joke was rather against Ireland. 
It was Ireland that was now missing a great 
historical opportunity for lack of humour and 
imagination, as England had missed it a mo- 
ment before. If the Irish would laugh at the 
English and help the English, they would 
win all along the line. In the real history 
of the German problem, they would inherit 
all the advantages of having been right from 
the first. It was now not so much a question 
of Ireland consenting to follow England^s 
lead as of England being obliged to follow 



The Englishman in Ireland 103 

Ireland's lead. These are the principles, 
which I thought, and still think, the only pos- 
sible principles to form the basis of a recruit- 
ing appeal in Ireland. But on the particular 
occasion in question I naturally took the mat- 
ter much more lightly; hoping that the two 
jokes might, as it were, cancel out, and leave 
the tw^o countries quits and in a better hu- 
mour. And I devoted nearly all my remarks 
to testifying that the English had really, in 
the mass, shed the cruder Teutonism that had 
excused the cruelties of the past. I said that 
Englishmen were anything but proud of the 
past government of Ireland; that the mass of 
men of all parties were far more modest and 
humane in their view of Ireland than most 
Irishmen seem to suppose. And I ended with 
words which I only quote here from memory, 
because they happen to be the text of the 
curious incident which followed: "This is 
no place for us to boast. We stand here in 
the valley of our humiliation, where the flag 
we love has done very little that was not evil; 
and where its victories have been far more 
disastrous than defeats;" and I concluded 



104! Irish Impressions 

with some general expression of the hope 
(which I still entertain) that two lands so 
much loved, by those who know them best, 
are not meant to hate each other for ever. 

A day or two afterwards a distinguished 
historian who is a professor at Trinity Col- 
lege, Mr. Alison Phillips, wrote an indignant 
letter to the Irish Times, He announced that 
he was not in the valley of humiliation ; and 
warmly contradicted the report that he was, 
as he expressed it, " sitting in sackcloth and 
ashes." He remarked, if I remember right, 
that I was middle-class, which is profoundly 
true; and he generally resented my sugges- 
tions as a shameful attack upon my fellow 
Englishmen. This both amused and puzzled 
me; for of course I had not been attacking 
Englishmen, but defending them; I had mere- 
ly been assuring the Irish that the English 
were not so black, or so red, as they were 
painted in the vision of "England's cruel red." 
I had not said there what I have said here, 
about the anomaly and absurdity of England 
in Ireland; I had only said that Ireland had 
sufifered rather from the Teutonic theory than 



The Englishman in Ireland 105 

the English temper; and that the English tem- 
per, experienced at close quarters, was really 
quite ready for a reconciliation with Ireland. 
Nor indeed did Mr. Alison Phillips really 
complain especially of my denouncing the 
English, but rather of my way of defending 
them. He did not so much mind being 
charged with the vice of arrogance. What 
he could not bear was being charged with the 
virtue of humility. What worried him was 
not so much the supposition of our doing 
wrong, as that anybody should conceive it pos- 
sible that we were sorry for doing wrong. 
After all, he probably reasoned, it may not 
be easy for an eminent historical scholar actu- 
ally to deny that certain tortures have taken 
place, or certain perjuries been proved; but 
there is really no reason why he should ad- 
mit that the memory of using torture or per- 
jury has so morbid an effect on the mind. 
Therefore he naturally desired to correct any 
impression that might arise, to the effect that 
he had been seen in the valley of humiliation, 
like a man called Christian. 

But there was one fancy that lingered in the 



106 Irish Impressions 

mind over and above the fun of the thing; and 
threw a sort of random ray of conjecture upon 
all that long international misunderstanding 
which it is so hard to understand. Was it 
possible, I thought, that this had happened 
before, and that I was caught in the treadmill 
of recurrence? It may be that whenever^ 
throughout the centuries, a roughly represent- 
ative and fairly good-humoured Englishman 
has spoken to the Irish as thousands of such 
Englishmen feel about them, some other 
Englishman on the spot has hastened to ex- 
plain that the English are not going in for 
sackcloth and ashes, but only for phylacteries 
and the blowing of their own trumpets before 
them. Perhaps whenever one Englishman 
said that the English were not so black as they 
were painted in the past, another Englishman 
always rushed forward to prove that the Eng- 
lish were not so white as they were painted 
on the present occasion. And after all it was 
only Englishman against Englishman, one 
word against another; and there were many 
superiorities on the side which refused to be- 
lieve in English sympathy or self-criticism. 



The Englishman in Ireland 107 

And very few of the Irish, I fear, understood 
the simple fact of the matter, or the real spir- 
itual excuses of the party thus praising spirit- 
ual pride. Few understood that I repre- 
sented large numbers of amiable Englishmen 
in England, while Mr. Phillips necessarily 
represented a small number of naturally irri- 
table Englishmen in Ireland. Few, I fancy, 
sympathised with him so much as I do; for 
I know very well that he was not merely 
feeling as an Englishman, but as an exile. 



VI — The Mistake of England 

I MET one hearty Unionist, not to say 
Coercionist in Ireland, in such a man- 
ner as to talk to him at some length; 
one quite genial and genuine Irish gen- 
tleman, who was solidly on the side of the 
system of British government in Ireland. 
This gentleman had been shot through the 
body by the British troops in their efforts 
to suppress the Easter Rebellion. The mat- 
ter just missed being tragic; but since it did, 
I cannot help feeling it as slightly comic. 
He assured me with great earnestness that the 
rebels had been guilty of the most calculated 
cruelties; and that they must have done their 
bloody deeds in the coldest blood. But since 
he is himself a solid and (I am happy to say) 
a living demonstration that the firing even on 
his own side must have been rather wild, I 

am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt 

loa 



The Mistake of England 109 

also to the less elaborately educated marks- 
men. When disciplined troops destroy peo- 
ple so much at random, it would seem un- 
reasonable to deny that rioters may possibly 
have been riotous. I hardly think he was, 
or even professed to^be, a person of judicial 
impartiality; and it is entirely to his honour 
that he was, on principle, so much more indig- 
nant with the rioters who did not shoot him 
than with the other rioters who did. But I 
venture to introduce him here not so much 
as an individual as an allegory. The incident 
seems to me to set forth, in a pointed, lucid, 
and picturesque form, exactly what the Brit- 
ish military government really succeeded in 
doing in Ireland. It succeeded in half-killing 
its friends, and affording an intelligent but 
somewhat inhumane amusement to all its en- 
emies. The fire-eater held his fire-arm in so 
contorted a posture as to give the wondering 
spectator a simple impression of suicide. 

Let it be understood that I speak here, not 
of tyranny thwarting Irish desires, but solely 
of our own stupidity in thwarting our own 
desires. I shall discuss elsewhere the alleged 



110 Irish Impressions 

presence or absence of practical oppression in 
Ireland ; here I am only continuing from the 
last chapter my experiences of the recruiting 
campaign. I am concerned now, as I was 
concerned then, with the simple business mat- 
ter of getting a big levy of soldiers from Ire- 
land. I think it was Sir Francis Vane, one 
of the few really valuable public servants in 
the matter (I need not say he was dismissed 
for having been proved right) , who said that 
the mere sight of some representative Belgian 
priests and nuns might have produced some- 
thing like a crusade. The matter seems to 
have been mostly left to elderly English land- 
lords; and it would be cruel to record their 
adventures. It will be enough that I found, 
for a positive fact, that these unhappy gentle- 
men had displayed throughout Ireland a pos- 
ter consisting only of the Union Jack and the 
appeal, " Is not this your flag? Come and 
fight for it! " It faintly recalls something we 
all learnt in the Latin grammar about ques- 
tions that expect the answer no. These re- 
markable recruiting-sergeants did not realise, 
I suppose, what an extraordinary thing this 



The Mistake of England 111 

was, not merely in Irish opinion, but gener- 
ally in international opinion. Over a great 
part of the globe, it would sound like a story 
that the Turks had placarded Armenia with 
the Crescent of Islam, and asked all the Chris- 
tians who were not yet massacred whether 
they did not love the flag. I really do not 
believe that the Turks would be so stupid as 
to do it. Of course it may be said that such 
an impression or association is mere slander 
and sedition, that there is no reason to be ten- 
der to such treasonable emotions at all, that 
men ought to do their duty to that flag what- 
ever is put upon that poster; in short, that it 
is the duty of an Irishman to be a patriotic 
Englishman, or whatever it is that he is ex- 
pected to be. But this view, however logical 
and clear, can only be used logically and 
clearly as an argument for conscription. It 
is simply muddle-headed to apply it to any 
appeal for volunteers anywhere, in Ireland or 
England. The whole object of a recruiting 
poster, or any poster, is to be attractive; it is 
picked out in words or colours to be pictur- 
esquely and pointedly attractive. If it low- 



112 Irish Impressions 

ers you to make an attractive offer, do not 
make it; but do not deliberately make it, and 
deliberately make it repulsive. If a certain 
medicine is so mortally necessary and so mor- 
tally nasty, that it must be forced on every- 
body by the policeman, call the policeman. 
But do not call an advertisement agent to push 
It like a patent medicine, solely by means of 
" publicity " and " suggestion," and then con- 
fine him strictly to telling the public how 
nasty it is. 

But the British blunder in Ireland was a 
much deeper and more destructive thing. It 
can be summed up in one sentence; that 
whether or no we were as black as we were 
painted, we actually painted ourselves much 
blacker than we were. Bad as we were, we 
managed to look much worse than we were. 
In a horrible unconsciousness we re-enacted 
history through sheer ignorance of history. 
We were foolish enough to dress up, and to 
play up, to the part of a villain in a very old 
tragedy. We clothed ourselves almost care- 
lessly in fire and sword; and if the fire had 
been literally stage-fire or the sword a wooden 



The Mistake of England 113 

sword, the merely artistic blunder would have 
been quite as bad. For instance, I soon came 
on the traces of a quarrel about some silly 
veto in the schools, against Irish children 
wearing green rosettes. Anybody with a 
streak of historical imagination would have 
avoided a quarrel in that particular case about 
that particular colour. It is touching the 
talisman, it is naming the name, it is striking 
the note of another relation in which we were 
in the wrong, to the confusion of a new rela- 
tion in which we were in the right. Any- 
body of common sense, considering any other 
case, can see the almost magic force of these 
material coincidences. If the English arm- 
ies in France in 1914 considered themselves 
justified for some reason in executing some 
Frenchwoman, they would perhaps be indis- 
creet if they killed her (however logically) 
tied to a stake in the market-place of Rouen. 
If the people of Paris rose in the most right- 
eous revolt against the most corrupt conspir- 
acy of some group of the wealthy French 
Protestants, I should strongly advise them not 
to fix the date for the vigil of St. Bartholo- 



114 Irish Impressions 

mew, or to go to work with white scarfs tied 
rouhd their arms. Many of us hope to see 
a Jewish commonwealth reconstituted in Pal- 
estine; and we could easily imagine some 
quarrel in which the government of Jerusalem 
was impelled to punish some Greek or Latin 
pilgrim or monk. The Jews might even be 
right in the quarrel and the Christian wrong. 
But it may be hinted that the Jews would be 
ill-advised if they actually crowned him with 
thorns, and killed him on a hill just outside 
Jerusalem. Now we must know by this time, 
or the sooner we know it the better, that the 
whole mind of that European society which 
we have helped to save, and in which we have 
henceforth a part right of control, regards 
the Anglo-Irish story as one of these black 
and white stories in a history book. It sees 
the tragedy of Ireland as simply and clearly 
as the tragedy of Christ or Joan of Arc. 
There may have been more to be said on the 
coercive side than the culture of the Continent 
understands. So there was a great deal more 
than is usually admitted, to be said on the side 
of the patriotic democracy which condemned 



The Mistake of England 115 

Socrates; and a very great deal to be said on 
the side of the imperial aristocracy which 
would have crushed Washington. But these 
disputes will not take Socrates from his niche 
among the pagan saints, or Washington from 
his pedestal among the republican heroes. 
After a certain testing time, substantial justice 
is always done to the men who stood in some 
unmistakable manner for liberty and light, 
against contemporary caprice and fashionable 
force and brutality. In this intellectual sense, 
in the only competent intellectual courts, there 
is already justice to Ireland. In the wide 
daylight of this world-wide fact, wc or our 
representatives must get into a quarrel with 
children, of all people, and about the colour 
green, of all things in the world. It is an 
exact working model of the mistake I mean. 
' It is the more brutal because it is not strictly 
cruel; and yet instantly revives the memories 
of cruelty. There need be nothing wrong 
w^ith it in the abstract, or in a less tragic 
atmosphere where the symbols were not tal- 
ismans. A schoolmaster in the prosperous 
and enlightened town of Eatanswill might not 



116 Irish Impressions 

unpardonably protest against the school- 
children parading in class the Buff and Blue 
favours of Mr. Simpkin and Mr. Slumkey. 
But who but a madman would not see that to 
say that word, or make that sign, in Ireland, 
was like giving a signal for keening, and the 
lament over lost justice that is lifted in the 
burden of the noblest of national songs; that 
to point to that rag of that colour was to bring 
back all the responsibilities and realities of 
that reign of terror when we were, quite lit- 
erally, hanging men and women too for wear- 
ing of the green? We were not literally 
hanging these children. As a matter of mere 
utility, we should have been more sensible if 
we had been. 

But the same fact took an even more fan- 
tastic form. We not only dressed up as our 
ancestors, but we actually dressed up as our 
enemies. I need hardly state my own convic- 
tion that the Pacifist trick of lumping the 
abuses of one side along with the abomina- 
tions of the other, was a shallow pedantry 
come of sheer ignorance of the history of 
Europe and the barbarians. It was quite 



The Mistake of England 117 

false that the English evil was exactly the 
same as the German. It was quite false; but 
the English in Ireland laboured long and de- 
votedly to prove it was quite true. They 
were not content with borrowing old uniforms 
from the Hessians of 1798, they borrowed the 
newest and neatest uniforms from the Prus- 
sians of 1914. I will give only one story that 
I was told, out of many, to show what I mean. 
There was a sort of village musical festival 
at a place called Cullen in County Cork, at 
which there were naturally national songs and 
very possibly national speeches. That there 
was a sort of social atmosphere, which its 
critics would call Sinn Fein, is exceedingly 
likely; for that now exists all over Ireland, 
and especially that part of Ireland. If we 
wish to prevent it being expressed at all, we 
must not only forbid all public meetings, but 
all private meetings, and even the meeting of 
husband and wife in their own house. Still 
there might have been a case, on coercionist 
lines, for forbidding this public meeting. 
There might be a case, on coercionist lines, 
for imprisoning all the people who attended 



118 Irish Impressions 

it; or a still clearer case, on those lines, for 
imprisoning all the people in Ireland. But 
the coercionist authorities did not merely for- 
bid the meeting; which would mean some- 
thing. They did not arrest the people at the 
meeting; which would mean something. They 
did not blow the whole meeting to hell with 
big guns ; which would also mean something. 
What they did was this. They caused a mil- 
itary aeroplane to jerk itself backwards and 
forwards in a staggering fashion just over the 
heads of the people, making as much noise 
as possible to drown the music, and dropping 
flare rockets and fire in various somewhat dan- 
gerous forms in the neighbourhood of any 
men, women, and children who happened to 
be listening to the music. The reader will 
note with what exquisite art, and fine fastid- 
ious selection, the strategist has here contrived 
to look as Prussian as possible without secur- 
ing any of the advantages of Prussianism. 
There was a certain amount of real danger 
to the children; but not very much. There 
was about as much as there generally has been 
when boys have been flogged for playing the 



The Mistake of England 119 

fool with fireworks. But by laborious!]^ 
climbing hundreds of feet into the air, in an 
enormous military machine, these ingenious 
people managed to make themselves a meteor 
in heaven and a spectacle to all the earth ; the 
English raining fire on women and children 
just as the Germans did. I repeat that they 
did not actually destroy children, though they 
did endanger them; for playing with fire- 
works is always playing with fire. And I 
repeat that, as a mere matter of business, it 
would have been more sensible if they had 
destroyed children. That would at least have 
had the human meaning that has run through 
a hundred massacres: "wolf-cubs who would 
grow into wolves." It might at least have 
the execrable excuse of decreasing the num- 
ber of rebels. What they did would quite 
certainly increase it. 

An artless Member of Parliament, whose 
name I forget, attempted an apology for this 
half-witted performance. He interposed in 
the Unionist interests, when the Nationalists 
were asking questions about the matter; and 
said with much heat, " May I ask Whether 



120 Irish Impressions 

honest and loyal subjects have anything to fear 
from British aeroplanes? " I have often won- 
dered what he meant. It seems possible that 
he was in the mood of that mediaeval fanatic 
who cried, " God will know his own " ; and 
that he himself would fling any sort of flam- 
ing bolts about anywhere, believing that they 
would always be miraculously directed to- 
wards the heads harbouring, at that moment, 
the most incorrect political opinions. Or per- 
haps he meant that loyal subjects are so su- 
perbly loyal that they do not mind being acci- 
dentally burnt alive, so long as they are as- 
sured that the fire was dropped on them by 
government officials out of a government ap- 
paratus. But my purpose here is not to 
fathom such a mystery, but merely to fix the 
dominant fact of the whole situation; that the 
government copied the theatricality of Pots- 
dam even more than the tyranny of Potsdam. 
In that incident, the English laboriously re- 
produced all the artificial accessories of the 
most notorious crimes of Germany; the flying 
men, the flame, the selection of a mixed 
crowd, the selection of a popular festival. 



The Mistake of England 121 

They had every part of it, except the point 
of it. It was as if the whole British army in 
Ireland had dressed up in spiked helmets and 
spectacles, merely that they might look like 
Prussians. It was even more as if a man had 
walked across Ireland on three gigantic stilts, 
taller than the trees and visible from the most 
distant village, solely that he might look like 
one of those unhuman monsters from Mars, 
striding about on their iron tripods in the 
great nightmare of Mr. Wells. Such was 
our educational efficiency, that, before the 
end, multitudes of simple Irish people really 
had about the English invasion the same par- 
ticular psychological reaction that multitudes 
of simple English people had about the Ger- 
man invasion. I mean that it seemed to come 
not only from outside the nation, but from 
outside the world. It was unearthly in the 
strict sense in which a comet is unearthly. 
It was the more appallingly alien for coming 
close; It was the more outlandish the farther 
it went inland. These Christian peasants 
have seen coming westward out of England 
what we saw coming westward out of Ger- 



122 Irish Impressions 

many. They saw science in arms; which 
turns the very heavens into hells. 

I have purposely put these fragmentary and 
secondary impressions before any general sur- 
vey of Anglo-Irish policy in the war. I do 
so, first, because I think a record of the real 
things, that seemed to bulk biggest to any real 
observer at any real moment, is often more 
useful than the setting forth of theories he 
may have made up before he saw any reali- 
ties at all. But I do it in the second place 
because the more general summaries of our 
statesmanship, or lack of statesmanship, are 
so much more likely to be found elsewhere. 
But if we wish to comprehend the queer 
cross-purposes, it will be well to keep always 
in mind a historical fact I have mentioned al- 
ready; the reality of the old Franco-Irish 
Entente. It lingers alive in Ireland ; and espe- 
cially the most Irish parts of Ireland. In the 
fiercely Fenian city of Cork, walking round 
the Young Ireland monument that seems to 
give revolt the majesty of an institution, a man 
told me that German bands had been hooted 
and pelted in those streets out of an indignant 



The Mistake of England 123 

memory of 1870. And an eminent scholar in 
the same town, referring to the events of the 
same " terrible year," said to me: " In 1870 
Ireland sympathised with France and Eng- 
land with Germany; and as usual, Ireland 
was right! " But if they were right when we 
were wrong, they only began to be wrong 
when we were right. A sort of play or par- 
able might be written to show that this appar- 
ent paradox is a very genuine piece of human 
psychology. Suppose there are two partners 
named John and James; that James has al- 
ways been urging the establishment of a 
branch of the business in Paris. Long ago 
John quarrelled with this furiously as a for- 
eign fad ; but he has since forgotten all about 
it; for the letters from James bored him so 
much that he has not opened any of them for 
years. One fine day John, finding himself in 
Paris, conceives the original idea of a Paris 
branch ; but he is conscious in a confused way 
of having quarrelled with his partner, and 
vaguely feels that his partner would be an 
obstacle to anything. John remembers that 
James was always cantankerous, and forgets 



124 Irish Impressions 

that he was cantankerous in favour of this 
project, and not against it. John therefore 
sends James a telegram, of a brevity amount- 
ing to brutality, simply telling him to come 
in v^ith no nonsense about it; and when he 
has no instant reply, sends a solicitor's letter 
to be followed by a writ. How James will 
take it depends very much on James. How 
he will hail this happy confirmation of his 
own early opinions will depend on whether 
James is an unusually patient and charitable 
person. And James is not. He is unfortu- 
nately the very man, of all men in the world, 
to drop his own original agreement and every- 
thing else into the black abyss of disdain, 
which now divides him from the man who 
has the impudence to agree with him. He is 
the very man to say he will have nothing to 
do with his own original notion, because it is 
now the belated notion of a fool. Such a 
character could easily be analysed in any good 
novel; such conduct would readily be be- 
lieved in any good play. It could not be be- 
lieved when it happened in real life. And 
it did happen in real life; the Paris project 



The Mistake of England 125 

was the sense of the safety of Paris as the 
pivot of human history; the abrupt telegram 
was the recruiting campaign, and the writ was 
conscription. 

As to what Irish conscription was, or rather 
would have been, I cannot understand any 
visitor in Ireland having the faintest doubt, 
unless (as is often the case) his tour was so 
carefully planned as to permit him to visit 
everything in Ireland except the Irish. Irish 
conscription was a piece of rank raving mad- 
ness which was fortunately stopped, with 
other bad things, by the blow of Foch at the 
second battle of the Marne. It could not pos- 
sibly produce at the last moment allies on 
whom we could depend; and it would have 
lost us the whole sympathy of the allies on 
whom we at that moment depended. I do 
not mean that American soldiers would have 
mutinied; though Irish soldiers might have 
done so; I mean something much worse. I 
mean that the whole mood of America would 
have altered, and there would have been some 
kind of compromise with German tyranny, 
in sheer disgust at a long exhibition of Eng- 



126 Irish Impressions 

lish tyranny. Things would have happened 
in Ireland, week after week, and month after 
month, such as the modern imagination has 
not seen except where Prussia has established 
hell. We should have butchered women and 
children; they would have made us butcher 
them. We should have killed priests, and 
probably the best priests. It could not be 
better stated than in the words of an Irish- 
man, as he stood with me in a high terraced 
garden outside Dublin, looking towards that 
unhappy city, who shook his head and said 
sadly, " They will shoot the wrong bishop." 
Of the meaning of this huge furnace of 
defiance I shall write when I write of the 
national idea itself. I am concerned here not 
for their nation but for mine; and especially 
with its peril from Prussia and its help from 
America. And it is simply a question of con- 
sidering what these real things are really like. 
Remember that the American Republic is 
practically founded on the fact, or fancy, that 
England is a tyrant. Remember that it was 
being ceaselessly swept with new waves of 
immigrant Irishry telling tales (too many of 



The Mistake of England 127 

them true, though not all,) of the particular 
cases in which England had been a tyrant. 
It would be hard to find a parallel to explain 
to Englishmen the effect of avv^akening tradi- 
tions so truly American by a prolonged dis- 
play of England as the tyrant in Ireland. A 
faint approximation might be found if we 
imagined the survivors of Victorian England, 
steeped in the tradition of Uncle Tom's 
Cabin, watching the American troops march 
through London. Suppose they noted that 
the negro troops alone had to march in chains, 
with a white man in a broad-brimmed hat 
walking beside them and flourishing a whip. 
Scenes far worse than that would have fol- 
lowed Irish conscription; but the only pur- 
pose of this chapter is to show that scenes 
quite as stupid marked every stage of Irish 
recruitment. For it certainly would not have 
reassured the traditional sympathisers with 
Uncle Tom to be told that the chains were 
only a part of the uniform, or that the niggers 
moved not at the touch of the whip, but only 
at the crack of it. 

Such was our practical policy; and the sin- 



128 Irish Impressions, 

gle and sufficient comment on it can be found 
in a horrible whisper which can scarcely now 
be stilled. It is said, with a dreadful plausi- 
bility, that the Unionists were deliberately 
trying to prevent a large Irish recruitment, 
which would certainly have meant reconcil- 
iation and reform. In plain words, it is said 
that they were willing to be traitors to Eng- 
land, if they could only still be tyrants to Ire- 
land. Only too many facts can be made to 
fit in with this; but for me it is still too hid- 
eous to be easily believed. But whatever our 
motives in doing it, there is simply no doubt 
whatever about what we did, in this matter 
of the Pro-Germans in Ireland. We did not 
crush the Pro-Germans; we did not convert 
them or coerce them; or educate them or ex- 
terminate them or massacre them. We man- 
ufactured them; we turned them out pa- 
tiently, steadily, and systematically as if from 
a factory; we made them exactly as we made 
munitions. It needed no little social science 
to produce in any kind of Irishman, any kind 
of sympathy with Prussia; but we were equal 
to the task. What concerns me here, how- 



The Mistake of England 129 

ever, is that we were busy at the same work 
among the Irish-Americans, and ultimately 
among all the Americans. And that would 
have meant, as I have already noted, the thing 
that I always feared ; the dilution of the pol- 
icy of the Allies. Anything that lool^ed like 
a prolonged Prussianism in Ireland would 
have meant a compromise; that is, a perpet- 
uated Prussianism in Europe. I know that 
some who agree with me in other matters 
disagree with me in this; but I should indeed 
be ashamed if, having to say so often where 
I think my country was wrong, I did not say 
as plainly where I think she was right. The 
notion of a compromise was founded on the 
coincidence of recent national wars which 
were only about the terms of peace, not about 
the type of civilisation. But there do recur, 
at longer historic intervals, universal wars of 
religion, not concerned with what one nation 
shall do, but with what all nations shall be. 
They recommence until they are finished, in 
things like the fall of Carthage or the rout 
of Attila. It is quite true that history is for 
the most part a plain road, which the tribes 



130 Irish Impressions 

of men must travel side by side, bargaining 
at the same markets or worshipping at the 
same shrines, fighting and making friends 
again; and wisely making friends quickly. 
But we need only see the road stretch but a 
little farther, from a hill but a little higher, 
to see that sooner or later it comes always 
to another place, where stands a winged im- 
age of Victory ; and the ways divide. 



VII— The Mistake of Ireland 



THERE is one phrase which certain 
Irishmen sometimes use in conversa- 
tion, which indicates the real mistake 
that they sometimes make in contro- 
versy. When the more bitter sort of Irish- 
man is at last convinced of the existence of 
the less bitter sort of Englishman, who does 
realise that he ought not to rule a Christian 
people by alternations of broken heads and 
broken promises, the Irishman has sometimes 
a way of saying, ^^ I am sure you must have 
Irish blood in your veins." Several people 
told me so when I denounced Irish conscrip- 
tion, a thing ruinous to the whole cause of the 
Alliance. Some told me so even when I re- 
called the vile story of '98; a thing damned 
by the whole opinion of the world. I assured 
them in vain that I did not need to have Irish 
blood in my veins in order to object to having 

131 



132 Irish Impressions 

Irish blood on my hands. So far as I know, 
I have not one single drop of Irish blood in 
my veins. I have some Scottish blood; and 
some which, judging merely by a name in the 
family, must once have been French blood. 
But the determining part of it is purely Eng- 
lish, and I believe East Anglian, at the flat- 
test and farthest extreme from the Celtic 
fringe. But I am here concerned, not with 
whether it is true, but with why they should 
want to prove it is true. One would think 
they would want to prove precisely the oppo- 
site. Even if they were exaggerative and un- 
scrupulous, they should surely seek to show 
that an Englishman was forced to condemn 
England, rather than that an Irishman was 
inclined to support Ireland. As it is, they 
are labouring to destroy the impartiality and 
even the independence of their own witness. 
It does not support, but rather surrenders 
Irish rights, to say that only the Irish can 
see that there are Irish wrongs. It is con- 
fessing that Ireland is a Celtic dream and 
delusion, a cloud of sunset mistaken for an 
island. It is admitting that such a nation is 



The Mistake of Ireland 133 

only a notion, and a nonsensical notion; but 
in reality it is this notion about Irish blood 
that is nonsensical. Ireland is not an illu- 
sion; and her wrongs are not the subjective 
fancies of. the Irish. Irishmen did not dream 
that they were evicted out of house and home 
by the ruthless application of a land law no 
man now dares to defend. It was not a night- 
mare that dragged them from their beds; nor 
were they sleepwalkers when they wandered 
as far as America. Skeffington did not have 
a delusion that he was being shot for keeping 
the peace; the shooting was objective, as the 
Prussian professors would say; as objective as 
the Prussian militarists could desire. The 
delusions were admittedly peculiar to the 
British official whom the British Government 
selected to direct operations on so important 
an occasion. I could understand it if the 
Imperialists took refuge in the Celtic cloud, 
conceived Colthurst as full of a mystic frenzy 
like the chieftain who fought with the sea, 
pleaded that Piggott was a poet whose pen 
ran away with him, or that Sergeant Sheridan 
romanced like a real stage Irishman. I could 



134 Irish Impressions 

understand it if they declared that it was 
merely in the elvish ecstasy described by Mr. 
Yeats that Sir Edward Carson, that famous 
First Lord of the Admiralty, rode on the top 
of the dishevelled wave; and Mr. Walter 
Long, that great Agricultural Minister, 
danced upon the mountains like a flame. It 
is far more absurd to suggest that no man 
can see the green flag unless he has some 
green in his eye. In truth this association 
between an Irish sympathy and an Irish an- 
cestry, is just as insulting as the old jibe of 
Buckingham, about an Irish interest or an 
Irish understanding. 

It may seem fanciful to say of the Irish 
nationalists that they are sometimes too Irish 
to be national. Yet this is really the case in 
those who would turn nationality from a sanc- 
tity to a secret. That is, they are turning it 
from something which every one else ought 
to respect, to something which no one else can 
understand. Nationalism is a nobler thing 
even than patriotism; for nationalism appeals 
to a law of nations; it implies that a nation is 
a normal thing, and therefore one of a num- 



The Mistake of Ireland 135 

ber of normal things. It is impossible to have 
a nation without Christendom; as it is im- 
possible to have a citizen without a city. Now 
normally speaking this is better understood 
in Ireland than in England; but the Irish 
have an opposite exaggeration and error; and 
tend in some cases to the cult of real insular- 
ity. In this sense it is true to say that the 
error is indicated in the very name of Sinn 
Fein. But I think it is even more encour- 
aged, in a cloudier and therefore more peril- 
ous fashion, by much that is otherwise valu- 
able in the cult of the Celts and the study of 
the old Irish language. It is a great mistake 
for a man to defend himself as a Celt when 
he might defend himself as an Irishman. For 
the former defence will turn on some tricky 
question of temperament, while the latter will 
turn on the central pivot of morals. Celti- 
cism, by itself, might lead to all the racial ex- 
travagances which have lately led more bar- 
baric races a dance. Celts also might come 
to claim, not that their nation is a normal 
thing, but that their race is a unique thing. 
Celts also might end by arguing not for an 



136 Irish Impressions 

equality founded on the respect for bound- 
aries, but for an aristocracy founded on the 
ramification of blood. Celts also might come 
to pitting the prehistoric against the historic, 
the heathen against the Christian, and in that 
sense the barbaric against the civilised. In 
that sense I confess I do not care about Celts; 
they are too like Teutons. 

Now of course every one knows that there 
is practically no such danger of Celtic Impe- 
rialism. Mr. Lloyd George will not attempt 
to annex Brittany as a natural part of Brit- 
ain. No Tories, however antiquated, will ex- 
tend their empire in the name of the Buff and 
Blue of the Ancient Britons. Nor is there 
the least likelihood that the Irish will over- 
run Scotland on the plea of an Irish origin 
for the old name of the Scots ; or that they will 
set up an Irish capital at Stratford-on-Avon 
merely because avon is the Celtic word for 
water. That is the sort of thing that Teu- 
tonic ethnologists do; but Celts are not quite 
so stupid as that, even when they are ethnol- 
ogists. It may be suggested that this is be- 
cause even prehistoric Celts seem to have been 



The Mistake of Ireland 137 

rather more civilised than historic Teutons. 
And indeed I have seen ornaments and uten- 
sils in the admirable Dublin museum, sugges- 
tive of a society of immense antiquity, and 
much more advanced in the arts of life than 
the Prussians w^ere, only a few centuries ago. 
For instance, there w^as actually what ap- 
peared to be a safety razor. I doubt if the 
godlike Goths had much use for a razor; or 
if they had, if it was altogether safe. Nor 
am I so dull as not to be stirred to an imag- 
inative sympathy with the instinct of modern 
Irish poetry to praise this primordial and 
mysterious order, even as a sort of pagan 
paradise; and that not as regarding a legend 
as a sort of lie, but a tradition as a sort of 
truth. It is but another hint of a suggestion, 
huge, yet hidden; that civilisation is older 
than barbarism; and that the further we go 
back into pagan origins, the nearer we come 
to the great Christian origin of the Fall. But 
whatever credit or sympathy be due to the 
cult of Celtic origins in its proper place, it 
is none of these things that really prevents 
Celticism from being a barbarous imperialism 



138 Irish Impressioris 

like Teutonism. The thing that prevents im- 
perialism is nationalism. It was exactly be- 
cause Germany was not a nation that it de- 
sired more and more to be an empire. For 
a patriot is a sort of lover, and a lover is a 
sort of artist; and the artist will always love 
a shape too much to wish it to grow shapeless, 
even in order to grow large. A group of 
Teutonic tribes will not care how many other 
tribes they destroy or absorb ; and Celtic tribes 
w^hen they were heathen may have acted, for 
all I know, in the same way. But the civil- 
ised Irish nation, a part and product of Chris- 
tendom, has certainly no desire to be entan- 
gled with other tribes or to have its outlines 
blurred with great blots like Liverpool and 
Glasgow, as well as Belfast. In that sense it 
is far too self-conscious to be selfish. Its in- 
dividuality may, as I shall suggest, make it too 
insular; it will not make it too imperial. This 
is a merit in nationalism too little noted ; that 
even what is called its narrowness is not 
merely a barrier to invasion, but a barrier to 
expansion. Therefore, with all respect to the 
prehistoric Celts, I feel more at home with 



The Mistake of Ireland 139 

the good if sometimes mad Christian gentle- 
man of the Young Ireland movement, or even 
the Easter Rebellion. I should feel more 
safe with Meagher of the Sword than with 
the primitive Celt of the safety razor. The 
microscopic meanness of the Mid-Victorian 
English writers, when they wrote about Irish 
patriots, could see nothing but a very small 
joke in modern rebels thinking themselves 
worthy to take the titles of antique kings ; but 
the only doubt I should have, if I had any, 
is whether the heathen kings were worthy of 
the Christian rebels. I am much more sure 
of the heroism of the modern Fenians than of 
the ancient ones. 

Of the artistic side of the cult of the Celts 
I do not especially speak here. And indeed 
its importance, especially to the Irish, may 
easily be exaggerated. Mr. W. B. Yeats long 
ago dissociated himself from a merely racial 
theory of Irish poetry; and Mr. W. B. Yeats 
thinks as hard as he talks. I often entirely 
disagree with him; but I disagree far more 
with the people who find him a poetical opi- 
ate, where I always find him a logical stim- 



140 Irish Impressions 

ulant. For the rest, Celticism in some aspects 
is largely a conspiracy for leading the Eng- 
lishman a dance, if it be a fairy dance. I 
suspect that many names and announcements 
are printed in Gaelic, not because Irishmen 
can read them, but because Englishmen can't. 
The other great modern mystic in Dublin, 
" A. E.," entertained us first by telling an 
English lady present that she would never re- 
sist the Celtic atmosphere, struggle how she 
might, but would soon be wandering in the 
mountain mists with a fillet round her head; 
which fate had apparently overtaken the son 
or nephew of an Anglican bishop who had 
strayed into those parts. The English lady, 
whom I happen to know rather well, made 
the characteristic announcement that she 
would go to Paris when she felt it coming 
on. But it seemed to me that such drastic 
action was hardly necessary, and that there 
was comparatively little cause for alarm; see- 
ing that the mountain mists certainly had not 
had that effect on the people who happen to 
live in the mountains. I knew that A. E. 
knew, even better than I did, that Irish peas- 



The Mistake of Ireland 141 

ants do not wander about in fillets, or indeed 
wander about at all, having plenty of much 
better work to do. And since the Celtic at- 
mosphere had no perceptible effect on the 
Celts, I felt no alarm about its effect on the 
Saxons. But the only thing involved, by way 
of an effect on the Saxons, was a practical 
joke on the Saxons; which may, however, 
have lasted longer in the case of the bishop's 
nephew than it did in mine. Anyhow, I con- 
tinued to move about (like Atalanta in Caly- 
don) with unchapleted hair, with unfilleted 
cheek; and found a sufficient number of Irish 
people in the same condition to prevent me 
from feeling shy. In a word, all that sort 
of thing is simply Mr. Russell's humour, espe- 
cially his good humour, which is of a golden 
and godlike sort. And a man would be very 
much misled by the practical joke if he does 
not realise that the joker is a practical man. 
On the desk in front of him as he spoke were 
business papers of reports and statistics, much 
more concerned with fillets of veal than fillets 
of vision. That is the essential fact about all 
this side of such men in Ireland. We may 



142 Irish Impressions 

think the Celtic ghost a turnip ghost; but we 
can only doubt the reality of the ghost; there 
is no doubt of the reality of the turnip. 

But if the Celtic pose be a piece of the 
Celtic ornament, the spirit that produced it 
does also produce some more serious ten- 
dencies to the segregation of Ireland, one 
might almost say the secretion of Ireland. 

In this sense, it is true that there is too 
much separatism in Ireland. I do not speak 
of separation from England; which, as I have 
said, happened long ago in the only serious 
sense, and is a condition to be assumed, not a 
conclusion to be avoided. Nor do I mean 
separation from a federation of free states un- 
fortunately known as the British Empire; for 
that is a conclusion that could still be avoided 
with a little common sense and common 
honesty in our own politics. I mean separa- 
tion from Europe, from the common Chris- 
tian civilisation by whose law the nations live. 
I would be understood as speaking here of 
exceptions rather than the rule; for the rule 
is rather the other way. The Catholic re- 
ligion, the most fundamental fact in Ireland, 



The Mistake of Ireland 143 

is itself a permanent communication with the 
Continent. So, as I have said, is the free 
peasantry which is so often the economic ex- 
pression of the same faith. Mr. James 
Stephens, himself a spiritually detached man 
of genius, told me with great humour a story 
which is also at least a symbol. A Catholic 
priest, after a convivial conversation and 
plenty of good wine, said to him confi- 
dentially: "You ought to be a Catholic. 
You can be saved without being a Catholic; 
but you can't be Irish without being a 
Catholic." 

Nevertheless, the exceptions are large 
enough to be dangers; and twice lately, I 
think, they have brought Ireland into danger. 
This is the age of minorities; of groups that 
rule rather than represent. And the two 
largest parties in Ireland, though more repre- 
sentative than most parties in England, were 
too much affected, I fancy, by the modern 
fashion, expressed in the world of fads by 
being Celtic rather than Catholic. They 
were just a little too insular to accept the old 
unconscious wave of Christendom; the Cru- 



144« Irish Impressions 

sade. But the case was more extraordinary 
than that. They were even too insular to ap- 
preciate, not so much their own international 
needs, as their own international importance. 
It may seem a strange paradox to say that 
both nationalist parties underrated Ireland as 
a nation. It may seem a more startling para- 
dox to say that in this the most nationalist was 
the least national. Yet I think I can explain, 
however roughly, w^hat I mean by saying that 
this is so. 

It is primarily Sinn Fein, or the extreme 
national party, which thus relatively failed to 
realise that Ireland is a nation. At least it 
failed in nationalism exactly so far as it failed 
to intervene in the war of the nations against 
Prussian imperialism. For its argument in- 
volved, unconsciously, the proposition that 
Ireland is not a nation; that Ireland is a tribe 
or a settlement, or a chance sprinkling of 
aborigines. If the Irish were savages op- 
pressed by the British Empire, they might 
well be indifferent to the fate of the British 
Empire; but as they were civilised men, they 
could not be indifferent to the fate of civilisa- 



The Mistake of Ireland. 145 

tion. The Kaffirs might conceivably be 
better off if the whole system of white coloni- 
sation, Boer and British, broke down and dis- 
appeared altogether. The Irish might sym- 
pathise with the Kaffirs; but they would not 
like to be classed with the Kaffirs. Hotten- 
tots might have a sort of Hottentot happiness 
if the last European city had fallen in ruins, 
or the last European had died in torments. 
But the Irish would never be Hottentots, even 
if they were Pro-Hottentots. In other words, 
if the Irish were what Cromwell thought they 
were, they might well confine their attention 
to Hell and Connaught; and have no sym- 
pathy to spare for France. But if the Irish 
are what Wolfe Tone thought they were, they 
must be interested in France, as he was inter- 
ested in France. In short, if the Irish are 
barbarians, they need not trouble about other 
barbarians sacking the cities of the world; but 
if they are citizens, they must trouble about 
the cities that are sacked. This is the deep 
and real reason why their alienation from the 
Allied cause was a disaster for their own na- 
tional cause. It was not because it gave fools 



146 Irish Impressions 

a chance of complaining that they were Anti- 
English. It was because it gave much 
cleverer people the chance of complaining 
that they were Anti-European. I entirely 
agree that the alienation was chiefly the fault 
of the English Government; I even agree that 
it required an abnormal imaginative mag- 
nanimity for an Irishman to do his duty to 
Ireland, in spite of being so insolently told to 
do it. But it is none the less true that Ireland 
to-day would be ten thousand miles nearer 
her deliverance if the Irishman could have 
made that effort; if he had realised that the 
thing ought to be done, not because such 
rulers wanted it, but rather although they 
wanted it. 

But the much more curious fact is this. 
There were any number of Irishmen, and 
those among the most Irish, who did realise 
this ; who realised it with so sublime a sincer- 
ity as to fight for their own enemies against 
the world's enemies; and consent at once to be 
insulted by the English and killed by the Ger- 
mans. The Redmonds and the old Nation- 
alist party, if they have indeed failed, have 



The Mistake of Ireland 147 

the right to be reckoned among the most heroic 
of all the heroic failures of Ireland. If theirs 
is a lost cause, it is wholly worthy of a land 
where lost causes are never lost. But the 
old guard of Redmond did also in its time, 
I fancy, fall into the same particular and 
curious error; but in a more subtle way and 
on a seemingly remote subject. They also, 
whose motives like those of the Sinn Feiners 
were entirely noble, did in one sense fail to be 
national, in the sense of appreciating the inter- 
national importance of a nation. In their 
case it was a matter of English and not 
European politics; and as their case was much 
more complicated, I speak with much less 
confidence about it. But I think there was a 
highly determining time in politics when cer- 
tain Irishmen got on to the wrong side in Eng- 
lish politics, as other Irishmen afterwards got 
on to the wrong side in European politics. 
And by the wrong side, in both cases, I not 
only mean the side that was not consistent 
with the truth, but the side that was not really 
congenial to the Irish. A man may act 
against the body, even the main body, of his 



14§ Irish Impressions 

nation; but if he acts against the soul of his 
nation, even to save it, he and his nation suffer. 
I can best explain what I mean by reaffirm- 
ing the reality which an English visitor really 
found in Irish politics, towards the end of the 
war. It may seem odd to say that the most 
hopeful fact I found, for Anglo-Irish rela- 
tions, was the fury with which the Irish were 
all accusing the English of perjury and 
treason. Yet this was my solid and sincere 
impression ; the happiest omen was the hatred 
aroused by the disappointment over Home 
Rule. For men are not furious unless they 
are disappointed of something they really 
want; and men are not disappointed except 
about something they were really ready to 
accept. If Ireland had been entirely in 
favour of entire separation, the loss of Home 
Rule would not be felt as a loss, but if any- 
thing as an escape. But it is felt bitterly and 
savagely as a loss ; to that at least I can testify 
with entire certainty. I may or may not be 
right in the belief I build on it; but I believe 
it would still be felt as a gain; that Dominion 
Home Rule would in the long run satisfy Ire- 



The Mistake of Ireland 149 

land. But it would satisfy her if it were 
given to her, not if it were promised to her. 
As it is, the Irish regard our government 
simply as a liar who has broken his word; I 
cannot express how big and black that simple 
idea bulks in the landscape and blocks up the 
road. And without professing to regard it as 
quite so simple, I regard it as substantially 
true. It is, upon any argument, an astound- 
ing thing the King, Lords, and Commons of 
a great nation should record on its statute- 
book that a law exists, and then illegally re- 
verse it in answer to the pressure of private 
persons. It is, and rnust be, for the people 
benefited by the law, an act of treason. The 
Irish v/ere not wrong in thinking it an act of 
treason, even in the sense of treachery and 
trickery. Where they were wrong, I regret 
to say, was in talking of it as if it were the 
one supreme solitary example of such trick- 
ery; when the whole of our politics were full 
of such tricks. In short, the loss of justice 
for Ireland was simply a part of the loss of 
justice in England; the loss of all moral au- 
thority in government, the loss of the popu- 



150 Irish Impressions 

larity of Parliament, the secret plutocracy 
which makes it easy to take a bribe or break 
a pledge, the corruption that can pass un- 
popular laws or promote discredited men. 
The lawgiver cannot enforce his law because, 
whether or no the law be popular, the law- 
giver is Vv^hoUy unpopular, and is perpetually 
passing wholly unpopular laws. Intrigue 
has been substituted for government; and the 
.public man cannot appeal to the public be- 
cause all the most important part of his policy 
is conducted in private. The modern poli- 
tician conducts his public life in private. 
He sometimes condescends to make up for it 
by affecting to conduct his private life in 
public. He will put his baby or his birthday 
book into the illustrated papers; it is his deal- 
ings with the colossal millions of the cosmo- 
politan millionaires that he puts in his pocket 
or his private safe. We are allowed to know 
all about his dogs and cats ; but not about those 
larger and more dangerous animals, his bulls 
and bears. 

Now there was a moment when England 
had an opportunity of breaking down this 



The Mistake of Ireland 151 

Parliamentary evil, as Europe afterwards had 
an opportunity (which it fortunately took) of 
breaking down the Prussian evil. The cor- 
ruption was common to both parties ; but the 
chance of exposing it happened to occur 
under the rule of a Home Rule party; which 
the Nationalists supported solely for the sake 
of Home Rule. In the Marconi Case they 
consented to whitewash the tricks of Jew 
jobbers whom they must have despised; just 
as some of the Sinn Feiners afterwards con- 
sented to whitewash the wickedness of Prus- 
sian bullies whom they also must have de- 
spised. In both cases the motive was wholly 
disinterested and even idealistic. It was the 
practicality that was unpractical. I was one 
of a small group which protested against the 
hushing up of the Marconi affair, but we al- 
>vays did justice to the patriotic intentions of 
the Irish who allowed it. But we based our 
criticism of their strategy on the principle of 
falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The man 
who will cheat you about one thing will cheat 
you about another. The men who will lie to 
you about Marconi, will lie to you about 



152 Irish Impressions 

Home Rule. The political conventions that 
allow of dealing in Marconis at one price for 
the party, and another price for oneself, are 
conventions that also allow of telling one story 
to Mr. John Redmond and another to Sir 
Edward Carson. The man who will imply 
one state of things when talking at large in 
Parliament, and another state of things when 
put into a witness-box in court, is the came 
sort of man who will promise an Irish settle- 
ment in the hope that it may fail; and then 
withdraw it for fear it should succeed. 
Among the rri^ny muddle-headed modern at- 
tempts to coerce the Christian poor to the 
Moslem dogma about wine and beer, one was 
concerned with abuse by loafers or tipplers of 
the privilege of the Sunday traveller. It was 
suggested that the travellers' claims were in 
everv sense travellers' tales. It was therefore 
proposed that the limit of three miles should 
be extended to six; as if it were any harder for 
a liar to say he had walked six miles than 
three. The politicians might be as ready to 
promise to walk the six miles to an Irish Re- 
public as the three miles to an Irish Parlia- 



The Mistake of Ireland 153 

ment. But Sinn Fein is mistaken in suppos- 
ing that any change of theoretic claim meets 
the problem of corruption. Those who 
would break their word to Redmond would 
certainly break it to De Valera. We urged 
all these things on the Nationalists whose na- 
tional cause we supported ; we asked them to 
follow their larger popular instincts, break 
down a corrupt oligarchy, and let a real popu- 
lar parliament in England give a real popular 
parliament to Ireland. With entirely hon- 
ourable motives, they adhered to the narrower 
conception of their national duty. They 
sacrificed everything for Home Rule; even 
their own profoundly national emotion of con- 
tempt. For the sake of Home Rule, or the 
solemn promise of Home Rule, they kept such 
men in power; and for their reward they 
found that such men were still in power; and 
Home Rule was gone. 

What I mean about the Nationalist Party, 
and what may be called its prophetic shadow 
of the Sinn Fein mistake, may well be sym- 
bolised in one of the noblest figures of that 
party or any party. An Irish poet, talking 



154 Irish Impressions 

to me about the pointed diction of the Irish 
peasant, said he had recently rejoiced in the 
society of a drunken Kerry farmer, whose 
conversation was a litany of questions about 
everything in heaven and earth, each ending 
with a sort of chorus of ^Will ye tell me 
that now?" And at the end of all he said 
abruptly, "Did ye know Tom Kettle?" and 
on my friend the poet assenting, the farmer 
said, as if in triumph, "And why are so many 
people alive that ought to be dead, and so 
many people dead that ought to be alive? 
Will ye tell me that now?" That is not un- 
worthy of an old heroic poem, and therefore 
not unworthy of the hero and poet of whom 
it was spoken. "Patroclus died, who was a 
better man than you." Thomas Michael 
Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of 
that greatness of spirit which was so ill re- 
warded on both sides of the channel and of the 
quarrel, which marked Redmond's brother 
and so many of Redmond's followers. He 
was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man am- 
bitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell 
fighting the barbarians because he was too 



The Mistake of Ireland 155 

good a European to use the barbarians against 
England, as England a hundred years before 
had used the barbarians against Ireland. 
There is nothing to be said of such things ex- 
cept what the drunken farmer said, unless it 
be a verse from a familiar ballad on a very 
remote topic, which happens to express my 
own most immediate feelings about politics 
and reconstruction after the decimation of 
the great war. 

" The many men so beautiful 
And they all dead did lie 
And a thousand thousand slimy things 
Lived on, and so did I." 

It is not a reflection that adds any inordinate 
self-satisfaction to the fact of one's own sur- 
vival. 

In turning over a collection of Kettle's ex- 
traordinary varied and vigorous writings, 
which contain some of the most pointed and 
piercing criticisms of materialism, of modern 
capitalism and mental and moral anarchism 
generally, I came on a very interesting criti- 



156 Irish Impressions 

cism of myself and my friends in our Marconi 
agitation; a suggestion, on a note of genial 
cynicism, that we were asking for an im- 
possible political purity; a suggestion which, 
knowing it to be patriotic, I will venture to 
call pathetic. I will not now return on such 
disagreements, a man with whom I so uni- 
versally agree; but it will not be unfair to 
find here an exact illustration of what I mean 
by saying that the national leaders, so far 
from merely failing as wild Irishmen, only 
failed when they were not instinctive enough, 
that is, not Irish enough. Kettle was a 
patriot whose impulse was practical and 
whose policy was impolitic. Here also the 
Nationalist underrated the importance of the 
intervention of his own nationality. Kettle 
left a fine and even terrible poem, asking if 
his sacrifices were in vain, and whether he and 
his people were again being betrayed. I 
think nobody can deny that he was betrayed; 
and it was not by the English soldiers with 
whom he marched to war, but by those very 
English politicians with whom he sacrificed 
so much to remain at peace. No man will ever 



The Mistake of Ireland 157 

dare to say his death in battle was in vain, not 
only because in the highest sense it could never 
be, but because even in the lowest sense it was 
not. He hated the icy insolence of Prussia; 
and that ice is broken, and already as weak as 
water. As Carlyle said of a far lesser thing, 
that at least will never through unending ages 
insult the face of the sun any more. The 
point is here that if any part of his fine work 
was in vain, it was certainly not the reckless 
romantic part; it was precisely the plodding 
parliamentary part. None can say that the 
weary marching and counter-marching in 
France was a thing thrown away; not only in 
the sense which consecrates all footprints 
along such a via crucis, or highway of the 
army of martyrs; but also in the perfectly 
practical sense, that the army was going some- 
where, and that it got there. But it might 
possibly be said that the weary marching and 
counter-marching at Westminster, in and out 
of a division lobby, belonged to what the 
French call the salle des pas perdus. If any- 
thing was practical it was the visionary ad- 
venture; if anything was unpractical it was 



158 Irish Impressions 

the practical compromise. He and his 
friends were betrayed by the men whose cor- 
ruptions they had contemptuously condoned, 
far more than by the men whose bigotries they 
had indignantly denounced. There dark-' 
ened about them treason and disappointment, 
and he that was the happiest died in battle; 
and one who knew and loved him spoke to 
me for a million others in saying: ^'And now 
we will not give you a dead dog until you 
keep your word." 



VIII — An Example and a Question 

WE all had occasion to rejoice at the 
return of Sherlock Holmes when 
he was supposed to be dead; and 
I presume we may soon rejoice in 
his return even when he is really dead. Sir 
Arthur Conan Doyle, in his widespread new 
campaign in favour of Spiritualism, ought at 
least to delight us with the comedy of Holmes 
as a control and Watson as a medium. But I 
have for the moment a use for the great 
detective not concerned with the psychical 
side of the question. Of that I will only say, 
in passing, that in this as in many other cases, 
I find myself in agreement with an authority 
about where the line is drawn between good 
and bad, but have the misfortune to think his 
good bad, and his bad good. Sir Arthur 
explains that he would lift Spiritualism to a 
graver and more elevated plane of idealism; 

159 



160 Irish Impressions 

and that he quite agrees with his critics that 
the mere tricks with tables and chairs are 
grotesque and vulgar. I think this quite true 
if turned upside down, like the table. I do 
not mind the grotesque and vulgar part of 
Spiritualism; what I object to is the grave and 
elevating part. After all, a miracle is a 
miracle and means something; it means that 
Materialism is nonsense. But it is not true 
that a message is always a message; and it 
sometimes only means that Spiritualism is also 
nonsense. If the table at which I am now 
writing takes to itself wings and flies out of 
the window, perhaps carrying me along with 
it, the incident will arouse in me a real intelli- 
gent interest, verging on surprise. But if the 
pen with which I am writing begins to scrawl 
all by itself, the sort of things I have seen in 
spirit writing; if it begins to say that all things 
are aspects of universal purity and peace, and 
so on, why, then I shall not only be annoyed, 
but also bored. If a great man like the late 
Sir William Crookes says a table went walk- 
ing upstairs, I am impressed by the news; but 
not by news from nowhere to the effect that 



An Example and a Question 161 

all men are perpetually going upstairs, up a 
spiritual staircase, which seems to be as 
mechanical and labour-saving as a moving 
staircase at Charing Cross. Moreover, even 
a benevolent spirit might conceivably throw 
the furniture about merely for fun; whereas 
I doubt if anything but a devil from hell 
would say that all things are aspects of purity 
and peace. 

But I am here taking from the Spiritualistic 
articles a text that has nothing to do with 
Spiritualism. In a recent contribution to 
Nash's Magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
remarks very truly that the modern world is 
weary and wicked and in need of a religion; 
and he gives examples of its more typical and 
terrible corruptions. It is perhaps natural 
that he should revert to the case of the Congo, 
and talk of it in the torrid fashion which re- 
calls the days when Morel and Casement had 
some credit in English politics. We have 
since had an opportunity of judging the real 
attitude of a man like Morel in the plainest 
case of black and white injustice that the 
world has ever seen. It was at once a replica 



162 Irish Impressions 

and a reversal of the position expressed in the 
Pious Editor's Creed; and might roughly be 
rendered in similar language. 

" I do believe in Freedom's cause 
Ez fur away ez tropics are ; 
But Belgians caught in Prussia's claws 
To me less tempting topics are. 
It's wal agin a foreign king 
To rouse the chapel's rigours; 
But Liberty's a kind of thing 
We only owe to niggers." 

He had of course a lurid denunciation of the 
late King Leopold, of which I will only say 
that, uttered by a Belgian about the Belgian 
king in his own land and lifetime, it would be 
highly courageous and largely correct; but 
that the parallel test is how much truth was 
told by British journalists about British Kings 
in their own land and lifetime; and that until 
we can pass that test, such denunciations do 
US very little good. But what interests me in 
the matter at the moment is this. Sir Arthur 
feels it right to say something about British 



An Eocample and a Question 163 

corruptions, and passes from the Congo to 
Putumayo, touching a little more lightly; for 
even the most honest Britons have an uncon- 
scious trick of touching more lightly on the 
case of British capitalists. He says that our 
capitalists were not guilty of direct cruelty, 
but of an attitude careless and even callous. 
But what strikes me is that Sir Arthur, with 
his taste for such protests and inquiries, need 
not have wandered quite so far from his own 
home as the forests of South America. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is an Irishman; 
and in his own country, within my own mem- 
ory there occurred a staggering and almost 
incredible crime, or series of crimes, which 
were worthier than anything in the world of 
the attention of Sherlock Holmes in fiction, 
or Conan Doyle in reality. It always will be 
a tribute to the author of Sherlock Holmes 
that he did, about the same time, do such good 
^vork in reality. He made an admirable plea 
for Adolf Beck and Oscar Slater; he was also 
connected, I remember, with the reversal of 
a miscarriage of justice in a case of cattle- 
mutilation. And all this, while altogether 16 



164t Irish Impressions 

his credit, makes it seem all the more strange 
that his talents could not be used for, and in, 
his own home and native country, in a mystery 
that had the dimensions of a monstrosity, and 
which did involve, if I remember right, a 
question of cattle-maim.ing. Anyhow, it was 
concerned with moonlighters and the charges 
made against them, such as the common one 
of cutting off the tails of cows. I can imagine 
Sherlock Holmes on such a quest, keen-eyed 
and relentless, finding the cloven hoof of 
some sinister and suspected cow. I can 
imagine Dr. Watson, like the cow's tail, al- 
ways behind. I can imagine Sherlock 
Holmes remarking, in a light allusive fashion, 
that he himself had written a little mono- 
graph on the subject of cows' tails; with dia- 
grams and tables solving the great traditional 
problem of how many cows' tails would reach 
the moon; a subject of extraordinary interest 
to moonlighters. And I can still more easily 
imagine him saying afterwards, having re- 
sumed the pipe and dressing-gown of Baker 
Street, "A remarkable little problem, Watson. 
In some of its features it was perhaps more 



An Example and a Question 165 

singular than any you have been good enough 
to report. I do not think that even the Toot- 
ing Trouser-Stretching Mystery, or the sin- 
gular little affair of the Radium Toothpick, 
offered more strange and sensational develop- 
ments." For if the celebrated pair had really 
tracked out the Irish crime I have in mind, 
they would have found a story which, con- 
sidered merely as a detective story, is by far 
the most dramatic and dreadful of modern 
times. Like nearly all such sensational 
stories, it traced the crime to somebody far 
higher in station and responsibility than any 
of those suspected. Like many of the most 
sensational of them, it actually traced the 
crime to the detective who was investigating 
it. For if they had really crawled about with 
a magnifying glass, studying the supposed 
footprints of the peasants incriminated, they 
would have found they were made by the 
boots of the policeman. And the boots of a 
policeman, one feels, are things that even 
Watson might recognise. 

I have told the astounding story of Sergeant 
Sheridan before; and I shall often tell it 



166 Irish Impressions 

again. Hardly any English people know it; 
and I shall go on telling it in the hope that all 
English people may know it some day. It 
ought to be first in every collection of causes 
celebres, in every book about criminals, in 
every book of historical mysteries; and on its 
merits it would be. It is not in any of them. 
It is not there because there is a motive, in 
all modern British plutocracy, against finding 
the big British miscarriages of justice where 
they are really to be found ; and that is a great 
deal nearer than Putumayo. It is a place far 
more appropriate to the exploits of the 
family of the Doyles. It is called Ireland ; and 
in that place a powerful British official named 
Sheridan had been highly successful in the 
imperial service by convicting a series of poor 
Irishmen of agrarian crimes. It was after- 
wards discovered that the British official had 
carefully committed every one of the crimes 
himself; and then, with equal foresight, per- 
jured himself to imprison innocent men, one 
of whom lost his reason. Any one who does not 
know the story will naturally ask what punish- 
ment was held adequate for such a Neronian 



An Example and a Question 167 

monster; I will tell him. He was bowed out 
of the country like a distinguished stranger, 
his expenses politely paid; as if he had been 
delivering a series of instructive lectures; and 
he is now probably smoking a cigar in an 
American hotel, and much more comfortable 
than any poor policeman who has done his 
duty. I defy anybody to deny him a place in 
our literature about great criminals. Charles 
Peace escaped many times before conviction; 
Sheridan escaped altogether after conviction. 
Jack the Ripper was safe because he was un- 
discovered; Sheridan was discovered and was 
still safe. But I only repeat the matter here 
for two reasons. First, we may call our rule 
in Ireland what we like; we may call it the 
Union when there is no union; we may call 
it Protestant ascendancy when we are no 
longer Protestants; or Teutonic lordship 
when we could only be ashamed of being 
Teutons. But this is what it is; and every- 
thing else is waste of words. And second, 
because an Irish investigator of cattle-maim- 
ing, so oblivious of the Irish cow, is in some 
danger of figuring as an Irish bull. 



168 Irish Impressions 

Anyhow, that is the real and remarkable 
story of Sergeant Sheridan, and I put it first 
because it is the most practical test of the 
practical question of whether Ireland is mis- 
governed. It is strictly a fair test; for it is a 
test by the minimum and an argument a 
fortiori, A British official in Ireland can run 
a career of crime, punishing innocent people 
for his own felonies; and when he is found 
out, he is found to be above the law. This 
may seem like putting things at the worst, but 
it is really putting them at the best. This 
story was not told us on the word of a wild 
Irish Fenian, or even a responsible Irish Na- 
tionalist. It was told, word for word as I 
have told it, by the Unionist Minister in 
charge of the matter and reporting it, with 
regret and shame, to Parliament. He was 
not one of the worst Irish Secretaries, who 
might be responsible for the worst regime; 
on the contrary, he was by far the best. If 
even he could only partially restrain or reveal 
such things, there can be no deduction in 
common sense except that in the ordinary 
way such things go on gaily in the dark, with 



An Example and a Question 169 

nobody to reveal and nobody to restrain them. 
It was not something done in those dark days 
of torture and terrorism, which happened in 
Ireland a hundred years ago; and which 
Englishmen talk of as having happened a 
million years ago. It was something that 
happened quite recently, in my own mature 
manhood, about the time that the better things 
like the Land Acts were already before the 
world. I remember writing to the West- 
minster Gazette to emphasise it when it oc- 
curred; but it seems to have passed out of 
memory in an almost half-witted fashion. 
But that peephole into hell has afforded me 
ever since a horrible amusement, when I hear 
the Irish softly rebuked for remembering old 
unhappy, far-off things and wrongs done in the 
Dark Ages. Thus I was especially amused to 
find the Rev. R. J. Campbell saying that 
" Ireland has been petted and coddled more 
than any other part of the British Isles "; be- 
cause Mr. Campbell was chiefly famous for 
a comfortable creed himself, for saying that 
evil is only " a shadow where light should 
be "; and there is no doubt here of his throw- 



170 Irish Impressions 

ing a .very black shadow where light is very 
much required. I will conceive the police- 
man at the corner of the street in which Mr. 
Campbell resides, as in the habit of killing a 
crossing-sweeper every now and then for his 
private entertainment, burgling the houses of 
Mr. Campbell's neighbours, cutting off the 
tails of their carriage horses, and otherwise 
disporting himself by moonlight a fairy. It 
is his custom to visit the consequences of each 
of these crimes upon the Rev. R. J. Campbell, 
whom he arrests at intervals, successfully con- 
victs by perjury, and proceeds to coddle in 
penal servitude. But I have another reason 
for mentioning Mr. Campbell, a gentleman 
whom I heartily respect in many other as- 
pects; and the reason is connected with his 
name, as it occurs in another connection on 
another page. It shows how in anything, 
but especially in anything coming from Ire- 
land, the old facts of family and faith out- 
weigh a million modern philosophies. The 
words in Who's Who? — " Ulster Protestant of 
Scottish ancestry " — give the really Irish and 
the really honourable reason for Mr. Camp- 



An Eocample and a Question 171 

bell's extraordinary remark. A man may 
preach for years, with radiant universalism, 
that many waters cannot quench love; but 
Boyne Water can. Mr. Campbell appears 
very promptly with what Kettle called " a 
bucketful of Boyne, to put the sunrise out." 
I will not take the opportunity of saying, like 
the Ulsterman, that there never was treason 
yet but a Campbell was at the bottom of it. 
But I will say that there never was Modern- 
ism yet, but a Calvinist was at the bottom of 
it. The Old Theology is much livelier than 
the New Theology. 

Many other such true tales could be told; 
but what we need here is a sort of test. This 
tale is a test; because it is the best that could 
be said, about the best that could be done, by 
the best Englishman ruling Ireland, in face 
of the English system established there; and 
it is the best, or at any rate the most, that we 
can know about that system. Another truth 
which might also serve as a test, is this: to 
note among the responsible English not only 
their testimony against each other, but their 
testimony against themselves. I mean the 



172 Irish Impressions 

consideration of how very rapidly we realise 
that our own conduct in Ireland has been 
infamous, not in the remote past, but in the 
very recent past. I have lived just long 
enough to see the wheel come full circle inside 
one generation; when I was a schoolboy, the 
sort of Kensington middle class, to which I 
belong, was nearly solidly resisting, not only 
the first Home Rule Bill, but any suggestion 
that the Land League had a leg to stand on, 
or that the landlords need do anything but 
get their rents or kick out their tenants. The 
whole Unionist Press, which was three-quar- 
ters of the Press, simply supported Clanri- 
carde, and charged any one who did not do 
so with supporting the Clan-na-Gael. Mr. 
Balfour was simply admired for enforcing 
the system, which it is his real apologia to 
have tried to end, or at least to have allowed 
Wyndham to end. I am not yet far gone in 
senile decay; but already I have lived to hear 
my countrymen talk about their own blind 
policy in the time of the Land League, ex- 
actly as they talked before of their blind 
policy in the time of the Limerick Treaty. 



An Example and a Question 173 

The shadow on our past shifts forward as 
we advance into the future ; and always seems 
to end just behind us. I was told in my youth 
that the age-long misgovernment of Ireland 
lasted down to about 1870; it is now agreed 
among all intelligent people that it lasted at 
least down to about 1890. A little common 
sense, after a hint like the Sheridan Case, will 
lead one to suspect the simple explanation 
that it is going on still. 

Now I heard scores of such stories as the 
Sheridan story in Ireland, many of which I 
mention elsewhere; but I do not mention 
them here because they cannot be publicly 
tested; and that for a very simple reason. 
We must accept all the advantages and dis- 
advantages of a rule of absolute and iron 
militarism. We cannot impose silence and 
then sift stories; we cannot forbid argument 
and then ask for proof; we cannot destroy 
rights and then discover wrongs. I say this 
quite impartially in the matter of militarism 
itself. I am far from certain that soldiers are 
worse rulers than lawyers and merchants; 
and I am quite certain that a nation has a 



174» Irish Impressions 

right to give abnormal power to its soldiers 
in time of war. I only say that a soldier, if 
he is a sensible soldier, will know what he is 
doing and therefore what he cannot do; that 
he cannot gag a man and then cross-examine 
him, any more than he can blow out his 
brains and then convince his intelligence. 
There may be — humanly speaking, there must 
be — a mass of injustices in the militaristic 
government of Ireland. The militarism it- 
self may be the least of them ; but it must in- 
volve the concealment of all the rest. 

It has been remarked above that establish- 
ing militarism is a thing which a nation had 
a right to do, and (what is not at all the same 
thing) which it may be right in doing. But 
with that very phrase " a nation," we collide 
of course with the whole real question; the 
alleged abstract wrong about which the Irish 
talk much more than about their concrete 
wrongs. I have put first the matters men- 
tioned above, because I wish to make clear, 
as a matter of common sense, the impression 
of any reasonable outsider that they certainly 
have concrete wrongs. But even those who 



An EiT ample and a Question 175 

doubt it, and say that the Irish have no con- 
crete grievance but only a sentiment of Na- 
tionalism, fall into a final and very serious 
error about the nature of the thing called Na- 
tionalism^ and even the meaning of the v^ord 
" concrete." For the truth is that, in dealing 
with a nation, the grievance which is most 
abstract of all is also the one which is most 
concrete of all. 

Not only is patriotism a part of practical 
politics, but it is more practical than any 
politics. To neglect it, and ask only for 
grievances,, is like counting the clouds and for- 
getting the climate. To neglect it, and think 
only of laws, is like seeing the landmarks and 
never seeing the landscape. 

It will be found that the denial of nation- 
ality is much more of a daily nuisance than 
the denial of votes or the denial of juries. 
Nationality is the most practical thing, be- 
cause so many things are national without be- 
ing political, or without being legal. A man 
in a conquered country feels it when he goes 
to market or even goes to church, which may 
be more often than he goes to law; and the 



176 Irish Impressions 

harvest is more general than the General 
Election. Altering the flag on the roof is like 
altering the sun in the sky ; the very chimney- 
pots and lamp-posts look different. Nay, 
after a certain interval of occupation, they 
are difTerent. As a man v^ould know he was 
in a land of strangers before he knew it was 
a land of savages, so he knows a rule is alien 
long before he knows it is oppressive. It is 
not necessary for it to add injury to insult. 

For instance, when I first walked about 
Dublin, I was disposed to smile at the names 
of the streets being gravely inscribed in Gaelic 
as well as English. I will not here discuss 
the question of what is called the Irish 
language, the only arguable case against 
which is that it is not the Irish language. 
But at any rate it is not the English language, 
and I have come to appreciate more imagi- 
natively the importance of that fact. It may 
be used rather as a weapon than a tool; but 
it is a national weapon if it is not a national 
tool. I see the significance of having some- 
thing which the eye commonly encounters, 
as it does a chimney-pot or a lamp-post; but 



An Eooample and a Question 177 

which is like a chimney reared above an Irish 
hearth or a lamp to light an Irish road. I 
see the point of having a solid object in the 
street to remind an Irishman that he is in Ire- 
land, as a red pillar-box reminds an English- 
man that he is in England. But there must 
be a thousand things as practical as pillar- 
boxes which remind an Irishman that, if he 
is in his country, it is not yet a free country; 
everything connected with the principal seat 
of government reminds him of it perpetually. 
It may not be easy for an Englishman to 
imagine how many of such daily details there 
are. But there is, after all, one very simple 
effort of the fancy, which would fix the fact 
for him for ever. He has only to imagine 
that the Germans have conquered London. 

A brilliant writer who has earned the name 
of a Pacifist, and even a Pro-German, once 
propounded to me his highly personal and 
even perverse type of internationalism by say- 
ing, as a sort of unanswerable challenge, 
" Wouldn't you rather be ruled by Goethe 
than by Walter Long? " I replied that 
words could not express the wild love and 



178 Irish Impressions 

loyalty I should feel for Mr. Walter Long, 
if the only alternative were Goethe. I could 
not have put my own national case in a 
clearer or more compact form. I might oc- 
casionally feel inclined to kill Mr. Long; 
but under the approaching shadow of Goethe, 
I should feel more inclined to kill myself. 
That is the deathly element in denational- 
isation; that it poisons life itself, the most 
real of all realities. But perhaps the best 
way of putting the point conversationally is 
to say that Goethe would certainly put up a 
monument to Shakespeare. I would sooner 
die than walk past it every day of my life. 
And in the other case of the street inscriptions, 
it is well to remember that these things, which 
we also walk past every day, are exactly the 
sort of things that always have, in a nameless 
fashion, the national note. If the Germans 
conquered London, they would not need to 
massacre me or even enslave me, in order to 
annoy me ; it would be quite enough that their 
notices were in a German style, if not in a 
German language. Suppose I looked up in 
an English railway carriage, and saw these 



An Eccample and a Question 179 

words written in English exactly as I have 
seen them in a German railway carriage 
written in German: " The outleaning of the 
body from the window of the carriage is be- 
cause of the therewith bound up life's danger 
strictly prohibited." It is not rude. It 
would certainly be impossible to complain 
that it is curt. I should not be annoyed by 
its brutality and brevity; but on the contrary 
by its elaborateness and even its laxity. But 
if it does not exactly shine in lucidity, it 
gives a reason; which after all is a very 
reasonable thing to do. By every cosmo- 
politan test, it is more polite than the sentence 
I have read in my childhood : " Wait until 
the train stops." This is curt; this might be 
called rude; but it never annoyed me in the 
least. The nearest I can gtt to defining my 
sentiment is to say that I can sympathise with 
the Englishman who wrote the English 
notice. Havmg a rude thing to write, he 
wrote it as quickly as he could, and went 
home to his tea; or preferably to his beer. 
But what is too much for me, an overpower- 
ing vision, is the thought of that German 



180 Irish Impressions 

calmly sitting down to compose that sentence 
like a sort of essay. It is the thought of him 
serenely waving away the one important word 
till the very end of the sentence, like the Day 
of Judgment to the end of the world. It is 
perhaps the mere thought that he did not 
break down in the middle of it, but endured 
to the end; or that he could afterwards calmly 
review it, and see that sentence go marching 
by, like the whole German army. In short, 
I do not object to it because it is dictatorial or 
despotic or bureaucratic or anything of the 
kind; but simply because it is German. 

Because it is German I do not object to it 
in Germany. Because it is German I should 
violently revolt against it in England. I do 
not revolt against the command to wait until 
the train stops, not because it is less rude, but 
because it is the kind of rudeness I can under- 
stand. The official may be treating me 
casually, but at least he is not treating himself 
seriously. And so, in return, I can treat him 
and his notice not seriously but casually. I 
can neglect to wait until the train stops, and 
fall down on the platform; as I did on the 



An Example and a Question 181 

platform of Wolverhampton, to the perma- 
nent damage of that fine structure. I can, by 
a stroke of satiric genius, truly national and 
traditional, the dexterous elimination of a 
single letter, alter the maxim to " Wait until 
the rain stops." It is a jest as profoundly 
English as the weather to which it refers. 
Nobody would be tempted to take such a 
liberty with the German sentence; not only 
because he would be instantly imprisoned in 
a fortress, but because he would not kaow at 
which end to begin. 

Now this is the truth which is expressed, 
though perhaps very imperfectly, in things 
like the Gaelic lettering on streets in Dublin. 
It will be wholesome for us who are English 
to realise that there is almost certainly an 
English way of putting things, even the most 
harmless things, which appears to an Irish- 
man quite as ungainly, unnatural, and 
ludicrous as that German sentence appears 
to me. As the famous Frenchman did not 
know when he was talking prose, the official 
Englishman does not know when he is talk- 
ing English. He unconsciously assumes that 



182 Irish Impressions 

he is talking Esperanto. Imperialism is not 
an insanity of patriotism; it is merely an il- 
lusion of cosmopolitanism. 

For the national note of the Irish language 
is not peculiar to what used to be called the 
Erse language. The whole nation used the 
tongue common to both nations with a differ- 
ence far beyond a dialect. It is not a differ- 
ence of accent, but a difference of style; 
which is generally a difference of soul. The 
emphasis, the elision, the short cuts and 
sharp endings of speech, show a variety 
which may be almost unnoticeable but is 
none the less untranslatable. It may be only 
a little more weight on a word, or an inver- 
sion allowable in English but abounding in 
Irish; but we can no more copy it than copy 
the compactness of the French on or the 
Latin ablative absolute. The commonest case 
of what I mean, for instance, is the locution 
that lingers in my mind with an agreeable 
phrase from one of Mr. Yeats's stories: 
" Whom I shall yet see upon the hob of hell, 
and them screeching.'' It is an idiom that 
gives the effect of a pointed postscript, a part- 



An Example and a Question 183 

ing kick or sting in the tail of the sentence, 
which is unfathomably national. It is note- 
worthy and even curious that quite a crowd 
of Irishmen, who quoted to me with just ad- 
miration the noble ending of Kathleen-na- 
Hulahan, where the newcomer is asked if 
he has seen the old woman who is the tragic 
type of Ireland going out, quoted his answer 
in that form, *^ I did not. But I saw a young 
woman; and she walking like a queen." I 
say it is curious; because I have since been 
told that in the actual book (which I cannot 
lay my hand on at the moment) a more classic 
English idiom is used. It would generally 
be most unwise to alter the diction of such a 
master of style as Mr. Yeats: though indeed 
it is possible that he altered it himself, as he 
has sometimes done, and not always, I think, 
for the better. But whether this form came 
from himself or from his countrymen, it was 
very redolent of his country. And there 
was something inspiring in thus seeing, as it 
were before one's eyes, literature becoming 
legend. But a hundred other examples could 
be given, even from my own short experi- 



184 Irish Impressions 

ence, of such fine turns of language, nor are 
the finest necessarily to be found in literature. 
It is perfectly true, though prigs may over- 
work and snobs underrate the truth, that in 
a country like this the peasants can talk like 
poets. When I was on the wild coast of 
Donegal, an old unhappy woman who had 
starved through the famines and the evic- 
tions, was telling a lady the tales of those 
times; and she mentioned quite naturally one 
that might have come straight out of times 
so mystical that we should call them mythi- 
cal; that some travellers had met a poor 
wandering woman with a baby in those great 
gray rocky wastes, and asked her who she 
was. And she answered, " I am the Mother 
of God, and this is Himself; and He is the 
boy you will all be wanting at the last." 

There is more in that story than can be 
put into any book, even on a matter in which 
its meaning plays so deep a part; and it 
seems almost profane to analyse it however 
sympathetically. But if any one wishes to 
know what I mean by the untranslatable 
truth which makes a language national, it 



An Eooample and a Question 185 

will be worth while to look at the mere dic- 
tion of that speech, and note how its whole 
effect turns on certain phrases and customs 
which happen to be peculiar to the nation. 
It is well known that in Ireland the hus- 
band or head of the house is always called 
"himself"; nor is it peculiar to the peas- 
antry, but adopted, if partly in jest, by the 
gentry. A distinguished Dublin publicist, a 
landlord and leader among the more na- 
tional aristocracy, always called me " him- 
self " when he was talking to my wife. It 
will be noted how a sort of shadow of that 
common meaning mingles with the more 
shining significance of its position in a 
sentence where it is also strictly logical, in 
the sense of theological. All literary style, 
especially national style, is made up of such 
coincidences; which are a spiritual sort of 
puns. That is why style is untranslatable; 
because it is possible to render the meaning, 
biit not the double meaning. There is even 
a faint differentiation in the half-humorous 
possibilities of the word "boy"; another 
wholly national nuance. Say instead, " And 



186 Irish Impressions 

He is the child " and it is something perhaps 
stiflfer, and certainly quite different. Take 
away, " This is Himself " and simply substi- 
tute "This is He "; and it is a piece of ped- 
antry ten thousand miles from the original. 
But above all it has lost its note of something 
national, because it has lost its note of some- 
thing domestic. All roads in Ireland, of fact 
or folk-lore, of theology or grammar, lead us 
back to that door and hearth of the house- 
hold, that fortress of the family which is the 
key-fortress of the whole strategy of the 
island. The Irish Catholics, like other 
Christians, admit a mystery in the Holy 
Trinity, but they may almost be said to ad- 
mit an experience in the Holy Family. 
Their historical experience, alas, has made it 
seem to them not unnatural that the Holy 
Family should be a homeless family. They 
also have found that there was no room for 
them at the inn, or anywhere but in the jail; 
they also have dragged their new-born babes 
out of their cradles, and trailed in despair 
along the road to Egypt, or at least along 
the road to exile. They also have heard in 



An E 00 ample and a Question 187 

the dark and the distance behind them, the 
noise of the horsemen of Herod. 

Now it is this sensation of stemming a 
stream, of ten thousand things all pouring 
one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, 
modes of address, assumptions in controversy, 
that make an Englishman in Ireland know 
that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely 
bewildered, as among a medley of strange 
things. On the contrary, if he has any sense, 
he soon finds them unified and simplified to 
a single impression; as if he were talking to 
a strange person. He cannot define it be- 
cause nobody can define a person; and no- 
body can define a nation. He can only see 
it, smell it, hear it, handle it, bump into it, 
fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be 
damned for doing it wrong. He must be 
content with these mere hints of its existence; 
but he cannot define it, because it is like a 
person; and no book of logic will undertake 
to define Aunt Jane or Uncle William. We 
can only say, with more or less mournful con- 
viction, that if Aunt Jane is not a person, 
there is no such thing as a person, and I say 



188 Irish Impressions 

with equal conviction that if Ireland is not 
a nation, there is no such thing as a nation. 
France is not a nation, England is not a na- 
tion; there is no such thing as patriotism on 
this planet. Any Englishman, of any party, 
with any proposal, may well clear his mind 
of cant about that preliminary question. If 
we free Ireland, we must free it to be a na- 
tion; if we go on repressing Ireland, we are 
repressing a nation; if we are right to repress 
Ireland, we are right to repress a nation. 
After that we may consider what can be done, 
according to our opinions about the respect 
due to patriotism, the reality of cosmopolitan 
and imperial alternatives, and so on. I wilt 
debate with the man who does not want man- 
kind divided into nations at all; I can 
imagine a case for the man who wants 
specially to restrain one particular nation, as 
I would restrain anti-national Prussia. But 
I will not argue with a man about whether 
Ireland is a nation, or about the yet more 
awful question of whether it is an island. I 
know there is a sceptical philosophy which 
suggests that all ultimate ideas are only 



An Eooample and a Question 189 

penultimate ideas; and therefore perhaps that 
all islands are really peninsulars. But I will 
claim to know what I mean by an island and 
what I mean by an individual; and when I 
think suddenly of my experience in the 
island in question, the impression is a single 
one; the voices mingle in a human voice 
which I should know if I heard it again, 
calling in the distance; the crowds dwindle 
into a single figure whom I have seen long 
ago upon a strange hill-side, and she walking 
like a queen. 



IX — Belfast and the Religious Problem 

OF that cloud of dream which seems 
to drift over so many Irish poems 
and impressions, I felt very little in 
Ireland. There is a real meaning 
in this suggestion of a mystic sleep; but it 
does not mean what most of us imagine, and 
is not to be found where we expect it. On 
the contrary, I think the most vivid impres- 
sion the nation left on me, was that it v/as 
almost unnaturally wide awake. I might al- 
most say that Ireland suffers from insomnia. 
This is not only literally true, of those tre- 
mendous talks, the prolonged activities of rich 
and restless intellects, that can burn up the 
nights from darkness to daybreak. It is true 
on the doubtful as well as the delightful side; 
and the temperament has something of the 
morbid vigilance and even of the irritability 
of insomnia. Its lucidity is not only super- 

190 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 191 

human, but it is sometimes in the true sense 
inhuman. Its intellectual clarity cannot re- 
sist the temptation to intellectual cruelty. If 
I had to sum up in a sentence the one fault 
really to be found with the Irish, I could do 
it simply enough. I should say it saddened 
me that I liked them all so much better than 
they liked each other. But it is our supreme 
stupidity that this is always taken as mean- 
ing that Ireland is a sort of Donnybrook Fair. 
It is really quite the reverse of a merely 
rowdy and irresponsible quarrel. So far from 
fighting with shillelaghs, they fight far too 
much with rapiers; their temptation is in the 
very nicety and even delicacy of the thrust. 
Of course there are multitudes who make no 
such deadly use of the national irony; but it 
is sufficiently common for even these to suf- 
fer from it; and after a time I began to un- 
derstand a little that burden about bitterness 
of speech, which recurs so often in the songs 
of Mr. Yeats and other Irish poets. 

" Though hope fall from you and love decay 
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue." 



192 Irish Impressions 

But there is nothing dreamy about the bit- 
terness; the worst part of it is the fact that 
the criticisms always have a very lucid and 
logical touch of truth. It is not for us to lec- 
ture the Irish about forgiveness, who have 
given them so much to forgive. But if some 
one who had not lost the right to preach to 
them, if St. Patrick were to return to preach, 
he would find that nothing had failed, 
through all those ages of agony, of faith and 
honour and endurance; but I think he might 
possibly say, what I have no right to say, a 
word about charity. 

There is indeed one decisive sense in which 
the Irish are very poetical; in that of giving 
a special and serious social recognition to 
poetry. I have sometimes expressed the fancy 
that men in the Golden Age might spontane- 
ously talk in verse; and it is really true that 
half the Irish talk is in verse. Quotation 
becomes recitation. But it is much too 
rhythmic to resemble our own theatrical rec- 
itations. This is one of my own strongest and 
most sympathetic memories, and one of my 
most definable reasons for having felt extraor- 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 193 

dinarily happy in Dublin. It was a paradise 
of poets, in which a man who may feel in- 
clined to mention a book or two of Paradise 
Lost, or illustrate his meaning with the com- 
plete ballad of the Ancient Mariner, feels he 
will be better understood than elsewhere. 
But the more this very national quality is 
noted, the less it will be mistaken for anything 
merely irresponsible, or even merely emo- 
tional. The shortest way of stating the truth 
is to say that poetry plays the part of music. 
It is in every sense of the phrase a social func- 
tion. A poetical evening is as natural as a 
musical evening; and being as natural it be- 
comes what is called artificial. As in some 
circles " Do you play? " is rather " Don't you 
play? " these Irish circles would be surprised 
because a man did not recite rather than be- 
cause he did. A hostile critic, especially an 
Irish critic, might possibly say that the Irish 
are poetical because they are not sufficiently 
musical. I can imagine Mr. Bernard Shaw 
saying something of the sort. But it might 
well be retorted that they are not merely 
musical because they will not consent to be 



194 Irish Impressions 

merely emotional. It is far truer to say that 
they give a reasonable place to poetry, than 
that they permit any particular poetic inter- 
ference with reason. " But I, whose virtues 
are the definitions of the analytical mind," 
says Mr. Yeats, and any one who has been in 
the atmosphere will know what he means. 
In so far as such things stray from reason, 
they tend rather to ritual than to riot. Poetry 
is in Ireland what humoUr is in America; it 
is an institution. The Englishman, who is 
always for good and evil the amateur, takes 
both in a more occasional and even accidental 
fashion. It must always be remembered here 
that the ancient Irish civilisation had a high 
order of poetry, which was not merely 
mystical, but rather mathematical. Like 
Celtic ornament, Celtic verse tended too much 
to geometrical patterns. If this was irra- 
tional, it was not by excess of emotion. It 
might rather be described as irrational by 
excess of reason. The antique hierarchy of 
minstrels, each grade with its own compli- 
cated metre, suggests that there was something 
Chinese about a thing so unhumanly civilised. 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 195 

Yet all this vanished etiquette is somehow in 
the air in Ireland; and men and women move 
to it, as to the steps of a lost dance. 

Thus, whether we consider the sense in 
which the Irish are really quarrelsome, or the 
sense in which they are really poetical, we 
find that both lead us back to a condition of 
clarity which seems the very reverse of a mere 
dream. In both cases Ireland is critical, and 
even self-critical. The bitterness I have ven- 
tured to lament is not Irish bitterness against 
the English ; that I should assume as not only 
inevitable, but substantially justifiable. It is 
Irish bitterness against the Irish; the remarks 
of one honest Nationalist about another hon- 
est Nationalist. Similarly, while they are 
fond of poetry, they are not always fond of 
poets; and there is plenty of satire in their 
conversation on the subject. I have said that 
half the talk may consist of poetry; I might 
almost say that the other half may consist of 
parody. All these things amount to an ex- 
cess of vigilance and realism; the mass of the 
people watch and pray, but even those who 
never pray never cease to watch. If they 



196 Irish Impressions 

idealise sleep, it is as the sleepless do; it might 
almost be said that they can only dream of 
dreaming. If a dream haunts them, it is 
rather as something that escapes them; and 
indeed some of their finest poetry is rather 
about seeking fairyland than about finding it. 
Granted all this, I may say that there was one 
place in Ireland where I did seem to find it, 
and not merely to seek it. There was one 
spot where I seemed to see the dream itself 
in possession; as one might see from afar a 
cloud resting on a single hill. There a dream, 
at once a desire and a delusion, brooded above 
a whole city. That place was Belfast. 

The description could be justified even lit- 
erally and in detail. A man told me in north- 
east Ulster that he had heard a mother warn- 
ing her children away from some pond, or 
similar place of danger, by saying, '^ Don't 
you go there ; there are wee popes there." A 
country where that could be said is like Elf- 
land as compared to England. If not exactly 
a land of fairies, it is at least a land of gob- 
lins. There is something charming in the 
fancy of a pool full of these peculiar elves, 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 197 

like so many efts, each with his tiny triple 
crown or crossed keys complete. That is the 
difference between this manufacturing dis- 
trict and an English manufacturing district, 
like that of Manchester. There are numbers 
of sturdy Nonconformists in Manchester; and 
doubtless they direct some of their educa- 
tional warnings against the system represented 
by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But no- 
body in Manchester, however Nonconform- 
ist, tells even a child that a puddle is a sort 
of breeding place for Archbishops of Canter- 
bury, little goblins in gaiters and aprons. It 
may be said that it is a very stagnant pool that 
breeds that sort of efts. But whatever view 
we take of it, it remains true, to begin with, 
that the paradox could be proved merely from 
superficial things like superstitions. Protes- 
tant Ulster reeks of superstition; it is the 
strong smell that really comes like a blast out 
of Belfast, as distinct from Birmingham or 
Brixton. But to me there is always some- 
thing human and almost humanising about 
superstition ; and I really think that such lin- 
gering legends about the Pope, as a being as 



198 Irish Impressions 

distant and dehumanised as the King of the 
Cannibal Islands, have served as a sort of neg- 
ative folk-lore. And the same may be said, 
in so far as it is true that the commercial prov- 
ince has retained a theology as well as a 
mythology. Wherever men are still theolog- 
ical there is still some chance of their being 
logical. And in this the Calvinist Ulsterman 
may be more of a Catholic Irishman than is 
commonly realised, especially by himself. 

Attacks and apologies abound about the 
matter of Belfast bigotry; but bigotry is by no 
means the v^orst thing in Belfast. I rather 
think it is the best. Nor is it the strongest 
example of what I mean, when I say that Bel- 
fast does really live in a dream. The other 
and more remarkable fault of the society has 
indeed a religious root; for nearly everything 
in history has a religious root, and especially 
nearly everything in Irish history. Of that 
theoretical origin in theology I may say some- 
thing in a moment; it will be enough to say 
here that what has produced the more prom- 
inent and practical evil is ultimately the the- 
ology itself, but not the habit of being theo- 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 199 

logical. It is the creed; but not the faith. 
In so far as the Ulster Protestant really has 
a faith, he is really a fine fellow; though per- 
haps not quite so fine a fellow as he thinks 
himself. And that is the chasm; and can be 
most shortly stated as I have often stated it 
in such debates, by saying that the Protestant 
generally says, ^' I am a good Protestant," 
while the Catholic always says, " I am a bad 
Catholic." 

When I say that Belfast is dominated by 
a dream, I mean it in the strict psychological 
sense; that something inside the mind is 
stronger than everything outside it. Non- 
sense is not only stronger than sense, but 
stronger than the senses. The idea in a man's 
head can eclipse the eyes in his head. Very 
worthy and kindly merchants told me there 
was no poverty in Belfast. They did not say 
there was less poverty than was commonly al- 
leged, or less poverty than there had been, or 
less than there was in similar places else- 
where. They said there was none. As a re- 
mark about the Earthly Paradise or the New 
Jerusalem, it would be arresting. As a re- 



200 Irish Impressions 

mark about the streets, through which they 
and I had both passed a few moments before, 
it was simply a triumph of the sheer madness 
of the imagination of man. These eminent 
citizens of Belfast received me in the kindest 
and most courteous fashion ; and I would not 
willingly say anything in criticism of them 
beyond what is necessary for the practical 
needs of their country and mine. But indeed 
I think the greatest criticism of them is that 
they would not understand what the criticism 
means. I will therefore clothe it in a para- 
ble, which is none the worse for having also 
been a real incident. When told there was 
no poverty in Belfast, I had remarked mildly 
that the people must have a singular taste in 
dress. I was gravely assured that they had 
indeed a most singular taste in dress. I was 
left with the general impression that wearing 
shirts or trousers decorated with large holes 
at irregular intervals was a pardonable form 
of foppery or fashionable extravagance. 
And it will always be a deep indwelling de- 
light, in the memories of my life, that just 
as these city fathers and I came out on to the 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 201 

steps of the hotel, there appeared before us 
one of the raggedest of the ragged little boys 
I had seen, asking for a penny. I gave him 
a penny, whereon this group of merchants was 
suddenly transfigured into a sort of mob, 
vociferating, " Against the law! Against the 
law! " and bundled him away. I hope it is 
not unamiable to be so much entertained by 
that vision of a mob of magistrates, so 
earnestly shooing away a solitary child like a 
cat. Anyhow, they knew not what they did ; 
and, what is worse, knew not that they knew 
not. And they would not understand, if I 
told them, what legend might have been made 
about that child, in the Christian ages of the 
world. 

The point is here that the evil in the de- 
lusion does not consist in bigotry, but in 
vanity. It is not that such a Belfast man 
thinks he is right; for any honest man has a 
right to think he is right. It is that he does 
think he is good, not to say great; and no 
honest man can reach that comfortable con- 
viction without a course of intellectual dis- 
honesty. What cuts this spirit off from 



202 Irish Impressions 

Christian common sense is the fact that the 
delusion, like most insane delusions, is merely 
egotistical. It is simply the pleasure of 
thinking extravagantly well of oneself; and 
unlimited indulgence in that pleasure is far 
more weakening than any indulgence in drink 
or dissipation. But so completely does it 
construct an unreal cosmos round the ego, that 
the criticism of the world cannot be felt even 
for worldly purposes. I could give many 
examples of this element in Belfast, as com- 
pared even with Birmingham or Manchester. 
The Lord Mayor of Manchester may not 
happen to know much about pictures ; but he 
knows men who know about them. But the 
Belfast authorities will exhibit a maniacally 
bad picture as a masterpiece, merely because 
it glorifies Belfast. No man dare put up such 
a picture in Manchester, within a stone's- 
throw of Mr. Charles Rowley. I care com- 
paratively little about the case of aesthetics; 
but the case is even clearer in ethics. So 
wholly are these people sundered from more 
Christian traditions that their very boasts 
lower them; and they abase themselves when 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 203 

they mean to exalt themselves. It never 
occurs to them that their strange inside stan- 
dards do not always impress outsiders. A 
great employer introduced me to several of 
his very intelligent employees; and I can 
readily bear w^itness to the sincerity of the 
great Belfast delusion even among many of 
the poorer men of Belfast. But the sincere 
efforts of them and their master, to convince 
me that a union with the Catholic majority 
under Home Rule was intolerable to them, 
all went to one tune, which .recurred with a 
kind of chorus, "' We won't have the likes of 
them making laws for the likes of us." It 
never seemed to cross their minds that this 
is not a high example of any human morality; 
that judged by pagan verecundia or Christian 
humility or modern democratic brotherhood, 
it is simply the remark of a snob. The man 
in question is quite innocent of all this; he 
has no notion of modesty, or even of mock 
modesty; he is not only superior, but he thinks 
it a superiority to claim superiority. 

It is here that we cannot avoid theology, 
because we cannot avoid theory. For the 



204 Irish Impressions 

point is that even in theory the one religious 
atmosphere now differs from the other. That 
the difference had historically a religious 
root is really unquestionable; but anyhow it 
is very deeply rooted. The essence of Cal- 
vinism was certainty about salvation; the es- 
sence of Catholicism is uncertanity about sal- 
vation. The modern and materialised form 
of that certainty is superiority; the belief of 
a man in a fixed moral aristocracy of men 
like himself. But the truth concerned here 
is that, by this time at any rate, the superiority 
has become a doctrine as well as an indul- 
gence. I doubt if this extreme school of 
Protestants believe in Christian humility 
even as an ideal. I doubt whether the more 
honest of them would even profess to believe 
in it. This can be clearly seen by comparing 
it with other Christian virtues; of which this 
decayed Calvinism offers at least a version, 
even to those who think it a perversion. 
Puritanism is a version of purity; if we think 
it a parody of purity. Philanthropy is a ver- 
sion of charity; if we think it a parody of 
charity, But in all this commercial Protes- 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 205 

tantism there is no version of humility; there 
is not even a parody of humility. Humility 
is not an ideal. Humility is not even a hypoc- 
risy. There is no institution, no command- 
ment, no common form of words, no popu- 
lar pattern or traditional tale, to tell any- 
body in any fashion that there is any such 
thing as a peril of spiritual pride. In short, 
there is here a school of thought and senti- 
ment that does definitely regard self-satisfac- 
tion as a strength ; as against the strong Chris- 
tian tradition in the rest of the country that 
does as definitely regard it as a weakness. 
That is the real moral issue in the modern 
struggle in Ireland; nor is it confined to 
Ireland. England has been deeply infected 
with this Pharisaical weakness; but as I have 
said, England takes things vaguely where 
Ireland takes them vividly. The men of 
Belfast offer that city as something supreme, 
unique and unrivalled; and they are very 
nearly right. There is nothing exactly like 
it in the industrialism of this country; but for 
all that, the fight against its religion of arro- 
gance has been fought out elsewhere and on 



206 Irish Impressions 

a larger field. There is another centre and 
citadel from which this theory, of strength in 
a self-hypnotised superiority, has despised 
Christendom. There has been a rival city to 
Belfast; and its name was Berlin. 

Historians of all religions and no religion 
may yet come to regard it as a historical fact, 
I fancy, that the Protestant Reformation of 
the sixteenth century (at least in the form it 
actually took) was a barbaric breakdown, 
like that Prussianism which was the ultimate 
product of the Protestantism. But however 
this may be, historians will always be inter- 
ested to note that it produced certain curious 
and characteristic things; which are worth 
studying whether we like or dislike them. 
And one of its features, I fancy, has been 
this; that it has had the power of producing 
certain institutions which progressed very 
rapidly to great wealth and power; which the 
world regarded at a certain moment as in- 
vincible; and which the world, at the next 
moment, suddenly discovered to be intoler- 
able. It was so with the whole of that Cal- 
vinist theology, of which Belfast is now left 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 207 

as the lonely missionary. It was so, even in 
our own time, with the whole of that indus- 
trial capitalism of which Belfast is now the 
besieged and almost deserted outpost. And 
it was so with Berlin as it was with Belfast; 
and a subtle Prussian might almost complain 
of a kind of treachery, in the abruptness with 
which the world woke up and found it want- 
ing; in the suddenness of the reaction that 
struck it impotent, so soon after it had been 
counted on omnipotent. These things seem 
to hold all the future; and in one flash they 
are things of the past. 

Belfast is an antiquated novelty. Such a 
thing is still being excused for seeming par- 
venu when it is discovered to be passe. For 
instance, it is only by coming in touch with 
some of the controversies surrounding the 
Convention, that an Englishman could realise 
how much the mentality of the Belfast leader 
is not so much that of a remote seventeenth 
century Whig, as that of a recent nine- 
teenth century Radical. His conventionality 
seemed to be that of a Victorian rather than 
a Williamite; and to be less limited by the 



208 Irish Impressions 

Orange Brotherhood than by the Cobden 
Club. This is a fact most successfully 
painted and pasted over by the big brushes 
of our own Party System, which has the art 
of hiding so many glaring facts. This 
Unionist Party in Ireland is very largely con- 
cerned to resist the m.ain reform advocated 
by the Unionist Party in England. A politi- 
cal humorist, who understood the Cobden 
tradition of Belfast and the Chamberlain 
tradition of Birmingham, could have a huge 
amount of fun appealing from one to the 
other; congratulating Belfast on the bold 
Protectionist doctrines prevalent in Ireland; 
adjuring Mr. Bonar Law and the Tariff Re- 
formers never to forget the fight made by Bel- 
fest for the sacred principles of Free Trade. 
But the fact that the Belfast school is merely 
the Manchester school is only one aspect of 
this general truth about the abrupt collapse 
into antiquity; a sudden superannuation. 
The whole march of that Manchester indus- 
trialism is not only halted but turned; the 
whole position is outflanked by new forces 
coming from new directions; the wealth of 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 209 

the peasantries blocks the road in front of it; 
the general strike has risen menacing its rear. 
That strange cloud of self-protecting vanity 
may still permit Belfast to believe in Belfast, 
but Britain does not really believe in Belfast. 
Philosophical forces far wider and deeper 
than politics have undermined the concep- 
tion of progressive Protestantism in Ireland. 
I should say myself that mere English as- 
cendancy in that island became intellectually 
impossible on the day when Shaftesbury in- 
troduced the first Factory Act, and on the 
day when Newman published the first pages 
of the Apologia, Both men were certainly 
Tories and probably Unionists. 

Neither were connected with the subject or 
with each other; the one hated the Pope and 
the other the Liberator. But industrialism 
was never again self-evidently superior after 
the first event, or Protestantism self-evidently 
superior after the other. And it needed a 
towering and self-evident superiority to ex- 
cuse the English rule in Ireland. It is only 
on the ground of unquestionably doing good 
that men can do so much evil as that. 



210 Irish Impressions 

Some Orangemen before the war indulged 
in a fine rhetorical comparison between Wil- 
liam of Prussia and William of Orange ; and 
openly suggested that the new Protestant De- 
liverer from the north would come from 
North Germany. I was assured by my more 
moderate hosts in Belfast that such Orange- 
men could not be regarded as representative 
or even responsible. On that I cannot pro- 
nounce. The Orangemen may not have been 
representative; they may not have been re- 
sponsible ; but I am quite sure they were right. 
I am quite sure those poor fanatics were far 
nearer the nerve of historical truth than 
professional politicians like Sir Edward Car- 
son or industrial capitalists like Sir George 
Clark. If ever there was a natural alliance 
in the world, it would have been the alliance 
between Belfast and Berlin. The fanatics 
may be fools, but they have here the light 
by which the foolish things can confound 
the wise. It is the brightest spot in Belfast, 
bigotry, for if the light in its body be dark- 
ness, it is still brighter than the darkness. By 
the vision that goes everywhere with the 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 211 

virility and greatness of religion, these men 
have indeed pierced to the Protestant secret 
and the meaning of four hundred years. 
Their Protestantism is Prussianism, not as a 
term of abuse, but as a term of abstract and 
impartial ethical science. Belfast and Berlin 
are on the same side in the deepest of all the 
spiritual issues involved in the war. And 
that is the simple issue of whether pride is 
a sin, and therefore a weakness. Modern 
mentality, or great masses of it, has seriously 
advanced the view that it is a weakness to 
disarm criticism by self-criticism, and a 
strength to disdain criticism through self-con- 
fidence. That is the thesis for which Berlin 
gave battle to the older civilisation in Eu- 
rope; and that for which Belfast gave battle 
to the older civilisation in Ireland. It may 
be, as I suggested, that such Protestant pride 
is the old Calvinism, with its fixed election 
of the few. It may be that the Protestantism 
is merely Paganism, with its brutish gods and 
giants lingering in corners of the more savage 
north. It may be that the Calvinism was 
itself a recurrence of the Paganism. But in 



21^ Irish Impressions 

any case, I am sure that this superiority, 
which can master men like a nightmare, can 
also vanish like a nightmare. And I strongly 
suspect that in this matter also, as in the 
matter of property as viewed by a peasantry, 
the older civilisation will prove to be the real 
civilisation; and that a healthier society will 
return to regarding pride as a pestilence, as 
the Socialists have already returned to regard- 
ing avarice as a pestilence. The old tradition 
of Christendom was that the highest form of 
faith was a doubt. It was the doubt of a 
man about his soul. It was admirably ex- 
pressed to me by Mr. Yeats, who is now cham- 
pion of Catholic orthodoxy, in stating his 
preference for mediaeval Catholicism as com- 
pared with modern humanitarianism; " Men 
were thinking then about their own sins, and 
now they are always thinking about other 
people's." And even by the Protestant test of 
progress, pride is seen to be arrested by a 
premature paralysis. Progress is superiority 
to oneself; and it is stopped dead by superior- 
ity to others. The case is even clearer by the 
test of poetry, which is much more solid 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 213 

and permanent than progress. The Super- 
man may have been a sort of poem; but he 
could never be any sort of poet. The more 
we attempt to analyse that strange element 
of wonder, which is the soul of all the arts, 
the more we shall see that it must depend on 
some subordination of the self to a glory ex- 
isting beyond it, and even in spite of it. Man 
always feels as a creature when he acts as a 
creator. When he carves a cathedral it is 
to make a monster that can swallow him. 
But the Nietzschean nightmare of swallow- 
ing the world is only a sort of yawning. 
When the evolutionary anarch has broken all 
links and laws and is at last free to speak, 
he finds he has nothing to say. So German 
songs under the imperial eagle fell silent like 
songbirds under a hawk; and it is but rarely, 
and here and there, that a Belfast merchant 
liberates his soul in a lyric. He has to get 
Mr. Kipling to write a Belfast poem, in a 
style technically attuned to the Belfast pic- 
tures. There is the true Tara of the silent 
harp, and the throne and habitation of the 
dream; and it is there that the Celtic pessi- 



214j Irish Impressions 

mists should weep in silence for the end of 
song. Blowing one's own trumpet has not 
proved a good musical education. 

In logic a wise man will always put the 
cart before the horse. That is to say, he will 
always put the end before the means; when 
he is considering the question as a whole. 
He does not construct a cart in order to exer- 
cise a horse. He employs a horse to draw 
a cart, and whatever is in the cart. In all 
modern reasoning there is a tendency to make 
the mere political beast of burden more im- 
portant than the chariot of man it is meant 
to draw. This had led to a dismissal of all 
such spiritual questions in favour of what 
are called social questions; and this to a too 
facile treatment of things like the religious 
question in Belfast. There is a religious 
question; and it will not have an irreligious 
answer. It will not be met by the limitation 
of Christian faith, but rather by the exten- 
sion of Christian charity. But if a man 
says that there is no difference between a 
Protestant and a Catholic, and that both can 
act in an identical fashion everywhere but in 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 215 

a church or chapel, he is madl}?- driving the 
cart-horse when he has forgotten the cart. 
A religion is not the church a man goes to 
but the cosmos he lives in ; and if any sceptic 
forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an 
Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne 
is a better philosopher than he. 

Many uneducated and some educated peo- 
ple in Belfast, quite sincerely believe that 
Roman priests are fiends, only waiting to re- 
kindle the fires of the Inquisition. For two 
simple reasons, however, I declined to take 
this fact as evidence of anything except their 
sincerity. First, because the stories, when re- 
duced to their rudiment of truth, generally 
resolved themselves into the riddle of poor 
Roman Catholics giving money to their own 
religion; and seemed to deplore not so much 
a dependence on priests as an independence 
of employers. And second for a reason 
drawn from my own experience, as well as 
common knowledge, concerning the Protes- 
tant gentry in the south of Ireland. The 
southern Unionists spoke quite without this 
special horror of Catholic priests or peasants. 



216 Irish Impressions 

They grumbled at them or laughed at them 
as a man grumbles or laughs at his neigh- 
bours; but obviously they no more dreamed 
that the priest would burn them than that he 
would eat them. If the priests were as black 
as the black Protestants painted them, they 
would be at their worst where they are with 
the majority; and would be known at their 
worst by the minority. It was clear that Bel- 
fast held the more bigoted tradition, not be- 
cause it knew more of priests, but because it 
knew less of them ; not because it was on the 
spot, but because the spot was barred. An 
even more general delusion was the idea that 
all the southern Irish dreamed and did no 
work. I pointed out that this also was incon- 
sistent with concrete experience; since all 
over the world a man who makes a small 
farm pay has to work very hard indeed. In 
historic fact, the old notion that the Irish 
peasant did no work, but only dreamed, had 
a simple explanation. It merely meant that 
he did no work for a capitalist's profit; but 
(dreamed of some day doing work for his own 
profit. But there may also have been this 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 217 

distorted truth in the tradition; that a free 
peasant, while he extends his own work, 
creates his own holidays. He is not idle all 
day, but he may be idle at any time of the 
day; he does not dream whenever he feels in- 
clined, but he does dream whenever he 
chooses. A famous Belfast manufacturer, a 
man of capacity, but one who shook his head 
over the unaccountable prevalence of priests, 
assured me that he had seen peasants in the 
south doing nothing, at all sorts of odd times; 
and this is doubtless the difference between 
the farm and the factory. The same gentle- 
man showed me over the colossal shipping of 
the great harbour, with all machinery and 
transport leading up to it. No man of any 
imagination would be insensible to such ti- 
tanic experiments of his race; or deny the 
dark poetry of those furnaces fit for Vulcan 
or those hammers worthy of Thor. But as 
I stood on the dock I said to my guide: 
" Have you ever asked what all this is for? " 
He was an intelligent man, an exile from 
metaphysical Scotland, and he knew what I 
meant. *^ I don't know," he said, " perhaps 



218 Irish Impressions 

we are only insects building a coral reef. I 
don't know what is the good of the coral 
reef." " Perhaps," I said, " that is what the 
peasant dreams about, and why he listens to 
the priest." 

For there seems to be a fashionable fallacy 
to the effect that religious equality is some- 
thing to be done and done with, that we may 
go on to the real matter of political equality. 
In philosophy it is the flat contrary that is 
true. Political equality is something to be 
done and done with, that we may go on to 
the much more real matter of religion. At 
the Abbey Theatre I saw a forcible play by 
Mr. St. John Ervine, called The Mixed 
Marriage; which I should remember if it 
were only for the beautiful acting of Miss 
Maire O'Neill. But the play moved me very 
much as a play; yet I felt that the presence of 
this fallacy falsified it in some measure. The 
dramatist seemed to resent a schism merely 
because it interfered with a strike. But the 
only object of striking is liberty; and the only 
object of liberty is life: a thing wholly spiri- 
tual. It is economic liberty that should be 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 219 

dismissed as these people dismiss theology. 
We only get it, to forget it It is right that 
men should have houses, right that they 
should have land, right that they should have 
laws to protect the land ; but all these things 
are only machinery to make leisure for the 
labouring soul. The house is only a stage 
set up by stage carpenters for the acting of 
what Mr. J. B. Yeats has called " the drama 
of the home." All the most dramatic things 
happen at home, from being born to being 
dead. What a man thinks about these things 
is his life; and to substitute for them a bustle 
of electioneering and legislation is to wander 
about among screens and pulleys on the wrong 
side of pasteboard scenery; and never to act 
the play. And that play is always a miracle 
play; and the name of its hero is Everyman. 
When I came back from the desolate 
splendour of the Donegal sea and shore, and 
saw again the square garden and the statue 
outside the Dublin hotel, I did not know I 
was returning to something that might well 
be called more desolate. For it was when I 
entered the hotel that I first found that it was 



220 Irish Impressions 

full of the awful tragedy of the Letnster. I 
had often seen death in a home, but never 
death decimating a vast hostelry; and there 
was something strangely shocking about the 
empty seats of men and women with whom 
I had talked so idly a few days before. It 
was almost as if there was more tragedy in 
the cutting short of such trivial talk than in 
the sundering of life-long ties. But there was 
all the dignity as well as the tragedy of man; 
and I was glad, before I left Ireland, to have 
seen the nobler side of the Anglo-Irish gar- 
rison; and to have known men of my own 
blood, however mistaken, so enduring the end 
of things. With the bad news from the sea 
came better news from the war; Mangin had 
struck the sensational blow that cut off the 
Germans as they marched upon Chalons; and 
with all the emotions of an exile, however 
temporary, I knew that my own land was 
secure. Somehow, the bad and good news 
together turned my mind more and more 
towards England; and all the inner humour 
and insular geniality which even the Irish 
may some day be allowed to understand. As 



Belfast and the Religious Problem 221 

I went homewards on the next boat that 
started from the Irish port, and the Wicklow 
hills receded in a rainy and broken sunlight, 
it was with all the simplest of those ancient 
appetites with which a man should come back 
to his own country. Only there clung to me, 
not to be denied, one sentiment about Ireland, 
one sentiment that I could not transfer to Eng- 
land; which called me like an elf land of so 
many happy figures, from Puck to Pickwick. 
As I looked at those rainy hills, I knew at 
least that I was looking, perhaps for the last 
time, on something rooted in the Christian 
faith. There at least the Christian ideal was 
something more than an ideal; it was in a 
special sense real. It was so real that it ap- 
peared even in statistics. It was so self-evi- 
dent as to be seen even by sociologists. It 
was a land where our religion had made even 
its vision visible. It had made even its un- 
popular virtues popular. It must be, in the 
times to come, a final testing-place, of whether 
a people that will take that name seriously, 
and even solidly, is fated to suffer or to 
succeed. 



222 Irish Impressions 

As the long line of the mountain coast un- 
folded before me I had an optical illusion; 
it may be that many have had it before. As 
new lengths of coast and lines of heights were 
unfolded, I had the fancy that the whole land 
was not receding but advancing, like some- 
thing spreading out its arms to the world. A 
chance shred of sunshine rested, like a riven 
banner, on the hill which I believe is called in 
Irish the Mountain of the Golden Spears; 
and I could have imagined that the spears 
and the banner were coming on. And in that 
flash I remembered that the men of this island 
had once gone forth, not the torches of con- 
querors or destroyers; but as missionaries in 
the very midnight of the Dark Ages, like a 
multitude of moving candles, that were the 
light of the world. 



THE END 



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